Memoir

David Santin Kilday’s Autobiography (1967-2023): The Memoir of an Unknown 

David Santin Kilday (DSK)

Copyright 2023

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I began this memoir in 2023, typing on a Chromebook, soon after I finished writing Lemonade and Applesauce on an iPad mini tablet with my index finger tapping on the individual keys on the tablet's touch screen keyboard.  I began this memoir by creating a skeleton of memories arranged chronographically.  Then I filled in the skeleton with elaborations and meditations on history.  While this document is a rough draft, I will comb out the knots in the text, in subsequent uploads to this WordPress page, and end each upload with a “+” where I have finished my progress so far.

David Santin Kilday (DSK)

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David Santin Kilday’s Resume

Professional Summary: I’ve worked many jobs including clerical, lifeguarding, shipping, delivery, labor, management, waiting tables, kitchen work, IT, and teaching. My all American experience would be an asset to any team.  I look forward to the opportunity to work with you in the future.

Education:

MA in English – University of Pittsburgh

1991 – 1998

Cumulative GPA 3.981

BA in English – Duke University

1986 – 1990

Cumulative GPA 3.316

Skills:

Experienced teacher

Proficient with Microsoft Word, Google Documents, and Apple Pages

Always punctual

Management experience in industrial sector

Always adheres to professional protocol

Skilled writer and close reader

Good researcher

Strong work ethic

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Work Experience:

Page Publishing, Conneaut PA – Author & Sole Proprietor 

Throughout 2023

Published two books of short stories, Lemonade and Applesauce, under my initials DSK.

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GRK Manufacturing, Portland OR – IT Work

June 1999 – January 2000

Created a web site. 

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University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA – Teaching Assistant/Teaching Fellow

September 1992 – January 1998

Began my graduate studies in September 1991.  I earned a Teaching Assistant scholarship that went into effect in September 1992.  I taught English Composition and was promoted from Teaching Assistant to Teaching Fellow in 1997.

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Fishmonger’s Restaurant and Deli, Durham NC – Restaurant Hand

February 1991 – July 1991

Waited tables, performed cooking and cleaning duties.

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Darryl’s Restaurant, Durham NC – Waiter

January 1991

Waited tables at Darryl's Ribs Restaurant on 15-501.

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GRK Manufacturing, Cincinnati OH – Second Shift Manager

September 1990 – January 1991

Supervised a second shift at a manufacturing plant. There were no injuries during my supervision.

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Dominoes, Durham NC – Delivery

Spring 1989

Delivered pizzas on the complex road system in Durham, NC in the days before automotive navigation screens.

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Harper’s Point Racquet and Swim Club, Cincinnati OH – Lifeguard

Summer 1985 and Summer 1986

Supervised swimmers, and kept grounds clean and safe.  I saved a drowning swimmer’s life.

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GRK Manufacturing, Cincinnati OH – Shipping Clerk

June 1984 – August 1984

Boxed manufactured goods, affixed postage and stored goods for shipping companies.

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Olsten Temporary, Cincinnati OH – Warehouse Work

Summer 1983

Operated a forklift.

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Olsten Temporary, Cincinnati OH – Construction

Summer 1983 

Helped frame a house with a nail gun.

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GRK Manufacturing, Cincinnati OH – Machine Operator

Summer 1992

Operated a drill press on an assembly line.

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WaldenBooks, Cincinnati OH – Cashier & Alphabetic Bookshelf Organizer         

Winter 1981 – Spring 1982

This was my first job.  I shelved books and operated the cash register.

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Book 1

Chapter 1

The story of my life starts in 1967 in a southern California community in Orange County called Rossmoor.  This planned community was built in a suburban mode.  It was set apart from the rest of Orange County by a brick wall.  From its start,  Rossmoor was a planned community characterized by this brick border wall.

Inside this wall, interlinked streets connected bungalows and interspersed school sites with their athletic fields.  It was a safe place, just inland from the prosperous beach community of Seal Beach, and it contained a comfortable bungalow in which I was placed in a crib after my birth at Long Beach Memorial Hospital on November 10, 1967.

While the neighborhood of Rossmoor has gentrified, at the time of my birth, Rossmoor was a residential community for the working middle class.  My father was a manager at Procter & Gamble and my mother was a public school teacher.  She retired from teaching to raise our family with my birth.

The 60s were raging at the time of my birth.  The Vietnam war kept getting more intense and the students were increasingly unified in their resistance to their nuclear superpower saturation bombing and napalming a third-world country for reasons which were in no way uniform or just.  TV at the time showed us the results of war’s savagery.  I am fascinated by war but I am a pacifist.  I wield a pen not a sword.

Today, market forces are used to penetrate the developing nations, but in 1967 the cold war was a hot war, the draft was on, and Vietnam seemed like Korea in the jungle–another proxy war designed to combat the Chinese mass and the Russian bear. 

Written largely on the page of 1967 was the dialectic of liberation and domination (Sayres, Sohnya, Stephanson, Anders, Aronowitz, Stanley, Jameson, Fredric, eds. The 60s Without Apologies. "Periodizing the 60s." Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press in Cooperation with Social Text, 1984).  In Noam Chomsky’s work, this dialectic is called the relationship between “freedom and control (Deterring Democracy).” Was the USA trying to “dominate” and “control” Vietnam?  Aren't domination and control typical of warfare and mankind as opposed to the peaceful homelife of  women as they are traditionally represented like in Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Cincinnatus exhibited a nice balance between the life of a soldier and the peaceful life of his country estate.

The military seemed hell bent on global domination in 1967, while the emergent liberation movements, like Cuba and China, inspired the global counterculture with their underdog successes.  The global student revolutionaries of the 60s looked to Castro, a shrewd strategist, and Mao, a former librarian and an avid reader with a long view, for inspiration and strategic method for a new democratic mass politics.  

The Students for a Democratic Society in the Port Huron Statement rejected communism as a program for the American New Left.  They sought instead a grand synthesis of America’s marginalized groups.  They sought a grand  union of the civil rights movement with the women's movement and the peace movement.

In 1967, suburban Rossmoor was a community that seemed far away from the restive worlds of the college campuses and the burning inner cities of 60s America.  Watts was nearby, but I recall only safety and peace in Rossmoor.  

It was not until I began to appreciate The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones, The Moody Blues, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, The Doors, and The Grateful Dead that I began to confront the 60s and their enduring legacy.

The 60s musical Renaissance, a rock and roll youth movement that flowered across the world, inspired me in my 1980s youth.  After I listened to some of The Beatles’ albums in sequence as a teenager, I was impressed by their emphasis on love.  The idea that love was an active process impressed me as a symptomatic idea of the 1960s. As Erich Fromm wrote, “Love is not a feeling; it is a practice.” There was a sense that making love for mutual pleasure and the enlargement of friendship and community—for liberation and not for domination—could build community and change the world.  The hippies said during the Vietnam War, “Make Love, Not War!” and The Who sang in My Generation, “Love Reign O’er Me.”

Look out for this Western concept of “Love.”  Throughout this book, I inquire about what love meant to me as a boy raised as a Methodist (I memorized part of Corinthians about love for confirmation)  and as a patriotic American with love of country.  Love is not simple.  I express love of country through criticism because I think that America has lost its way.  Patriotism is celebrated on Memorial Day and the Fourth of July but our country has more problems than anything to be celebrated (other than our past).  In my youth, I was a naive patriot.   I recall being caught up in the year long Bicentennial celebration that culminated on July 4th 1976 with its red, white, and blue popsicles and Sno-Cones.  Mood rings and Silly Putty were in in 1976 too.

I write as a celibate, so my perceptions of the “Swinging Sixties” may be askew.  I have qualified my own experience of love, for hasn’t this concept of “Love” been used to manipulate me against my better interests.  Beware foolish, youthful love.  Pay attention to the ways in which I write about love in this book.  Love can be simple and naive.  Love can be complex and informed.  Love can be used to justify terror.  I present a nuanced and historicized view of the concept of “Love” in this book as the concept evolved for me.  My final conclusion is that adult love must be a combination of concern, care, and respect and that love has little to do with sex, passion, or beauty.

Music meant something to me growing up.  Neil Young had value to me because he identified the perils of intravenous drug use in his tune “The Needle and the Damage Done.”  I never used intravenous drugs.  Later in his career, I knew Neil Young hadn’t compromised when he performed, for the first time in 1989, "Keep on Rockin' in the Free World." This unrelenting critique of the results of the selfishness of power spoke truth to power to a nation that had abandoned the poor to the streets.  In this tune, Neil Young continued his critique of addiction when he sang “she puts the kid away” in a garbage can for “she’s gone to get a hit.”  His idea of a “free world” is a celebration of hope and late 1980s sardonic irony in the face of the overwhelming neglect and repression of the homeless.

In my teenage years, I listened to The Who’s Quadraphenia and Tommy. I recall the interiority of “Behind Blue Eyes.” I was young, and this idea that my complex interior or subjective  relationship with the objective world was shared with other teenagers indicated a development in my own sense of psychology and community.  Roger Daultry of The Who sang about the agony of being misperceived.  I identified with his "bad and sad man" for, in teenage isolation, I was frequently seen as a black sheep. Now, I dress as a black sheep.  I wear weeds.  At the time, I didn’t feel like a bad person, just a young person subjected to the unwelcome scrutiny of adult men and adult women.  

My adult educators, both men and women, were some of my most important influences in my life apart from my family and friends.  Neither am I without sympathy for the adults of the sixties, many of whom were my educators, nor am I without criticism of the youth.  Theodor Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia about the complexity of the relationship between the youth and the old.

Once we rebelled against (our parents) insistence on the reality principle, the sobriety forever prone to become wrath against those less willing to renounce. But today we are faced with a generation purporting to be young yet in all its reactions insufferably more grown up than its parents ever were; which having renounced before any conflict, draws from this its grimly authoritarian, unshakeable power. Perhaps people have at all times felt the parental generation to become harmless, powerless, with the waning of physical strength, while their own generation already seemed threatened by the young: in an antagonistic society the relation between generations too is one of competition, behind which stands naked power. But today it is beginning to regress to particle. One of the Nazi”s symbolic outrages was the killing of the very old. Such a climate fosters a late, lucid understanding with our parents, as between condemned, marred only by the fear that we, powerless ourselves, might now be unable to care for them as they cared for us when they possessed something. The violence done to them makes us forget the violence they did (Adorno. Minima Moralia.).

The children of the sixties, the peaceniks, have “renounced” the values of the old but share with them the sense of being “condemned” to doom by Nazi tyranny.  The young realize the responsibility of the old when they must care for their own parents.

I used to cling to a notion of “the good,” a Western notion I hope I complicate historically and personally.  Now I don’t like the term “good" at all.  Didn't the Nazis think they were good when they killed six million Jews.  Good has been used to justify evil historically so that it is almost an offensive concept. The Western notion of the good is defined by these definitions which exhibit the varied facets of the term “good.” Good means 

“being approved” or “having the required qualities” or “displaying moral virtue” or “giving pleasure” or “valid” or “used in conjunction with an exclamation (The American OED).”

Conservatives don't try to be good.  Liberals are often hypocritical and underplay their own forms of authoritarianism.  I admire the term “just.”   I unequivocally oppose evil.  Evil is simply crime.  The values of piracy, theft and rapine, are the values of evil I oppose.  Evil is insidious.  Evil people call the just evil in their hypocrisy.  The just is what is required of necessity by the directives of Law.

I worked as a teenager in many roles and then again as an adult when I worked as a teacher. I taught three classes of 22 students a year while I researched intellectual matters for lectures and seminars as a graduate student. "I put my back into my living (The Who)" for less than twelve thousand dollars a year as a Teaching Assistant (TA).  I was just happy to be learning.

When, later, they broke my back, I lived in pain for months before a neurosurgeon fused my fourth and fifth vertebrae and installed two titanium rods—one on either side of my spine--for support.  It took me several weeks to recover my strength, but the results of the surgery were excellent.

My graduating class of 1986, from a public high school in Ohio, was the first class that was not permitted to drink beer legally as teenagers. We drank beer in high school anyway.  We weren’t bad, just screwed over, in our view, by an arbitrary new law.  I learned early-on about civil disobedience.

The rock & roll musical vanguard of the 60s complicated the establishment of the teenager market category of the 1950s in which vinyl recordings by African American musicians came to be appreciated and purchased by the youth.  60s rock & roll came partially from the celebration of folk in Greenwich Village, New York City.  The scholars of the Smithsonian even recorded and published folk on vinyl.  This folk music came from Appalachian, country, and blues regions.  Elvis the Pelvis was an Appalachian guitar singer songwriter who went mainstream in the Hollywood movies he made in his hayday in the 1960s.  Folk was played on acoustic guitars and sung by the people of Greenwich Village in Greenwich Village's Washington Square Park until the forces of domination and control banned singing in the square.  Wasn't the fate of the Sixties the fate of silenced park or have the values of the Sixties penetrated American life or is the difference between these two notions the range of the present culture war which we must outwit and outlast.

Bob Dylan, a poet and singer songwriter known for his insight and raw honesty, wrote

“Democracy don't rule the world.

You'd better get that in your head;

This world is ruled by violence

But I guess that is better left unsaid.”

What Bob Dylan sang to the youth of the Union serves as an apt warning to the youth of today about the piracy of the adult world.

They will rob you

With a six gun;

They will rob you 

With a pen.

Bob Dylan traveled from Minnesota to Greenwich Village to meet Woody Guthrie, his idol.  When he found that Guthrie was in the hospital with a deadly, chronic disease, Dylan frequently visited him there.  The folk musicians were socially conscious.  They wrote from the perspective of the poor.  Dylan used some of the themes present in Steinbeck, The Bible, and French Symbolist Poetry in his art.  Following Woody Guthrie, Dylan brought a complex social consciousness to the songwriting of the period. 

Bob Dylan received a positive review in The New York Times as early as age twenty.  His youthful, twenty year old, angelic face was captured in a photograph in the New York Times that seemed to represent the continuity of the folk movement with the avant-garde youth movement of the 60s.  American folk, as performed in the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village and in Washington Square Park on acoustic guitars, was part of the music of the 60s.  There are many guitar singer songwriters to recall from the hippie era.

The Beatles, definitely not folk, spearheaded the British pop invasion.  The Rolling Stones, on the other hand, played Memphis blues.  The Beatles, perhaps because of their jangly melodies and catchy lyrics, were musicians from economically depressed, industrial, working class Liverpool (and vice-ridden Hamburg where The Beatles performed extensively), became psychedelic, political, and very rich. One of their records sold a record 360,000 albums in one week. This was a record unsurpassed until the Arctic Monkeys.  Paul McCartney and John Lennon were very much alive and on the radio in the 1980s of my childhood.

God, country, and family (ideologies valorized verbatim by the Italian fascists of Mussolini) were qualified in the 60s by a critique of fascism that was secular, anti-military, and a curious admixture of the individual and the new youth community outside of the family.  The 60s valued the expression of individuality.  Certainly the Beat movement heavily influenced the hippie movement.  Alan Ginsburg transformed from howling beatnik to hippie flower child, for example.  The hippies valued the collectivity produced by the shared experience of the youth–in this case: the sexual revolution, the movement for women’s rights, the struggle for civil rights, resistance to the Vietnam War, and the shared new music of rock & roll.  

I listened to the music of the 1960s as a teenager during the 1980s.  Like the hippies of the sixties, I listened to rock and roll when I was a teenager on vinyl records.  I also frequently listened to Cincinnati's WEBN radio station which had a classic rock format.  WEBN now has a sister station that emits Alternative Rock too.  While I admire the communitarian impulse of the sixties, and consider organic (in Gramsci’s sense) community ideal, I am an introvert, an independent scholar (an inorganic intellectual), and most comfortable alone with my personal library of hundreds of books, my thoughts, and my writings.  I respond to the music of the spheres.  I am suspicious of any community and uncomfortable in crowds.  I consider most public opinion “groupthink" (in the words of Orwell's 1984) and hope to remain on the periphery of all communities.  I read The Bible.  I don’t attend church.

I make alternative worlds for my readers to inhabit.  I do this because it is a responsible practice, communitarian in a shared way, and because it is entertaining, educational, and informative to me and, I hope, to my readers.  Good writing is painstaking and time consuming.  By the time you read this final text, I will have revised the document many, many times and made hundreds of alterations.  I can think of little better to do with my free time, for these reasons, than research and write.

The 60s openly flirted with a leftism that had been forbidden in the 1950s. The liberation of the oppressed was the simple ideal of the left wing of the political spectrum at that time.  I will refer to this as the old left.  In the 1950s, the United State’s military externally attacked communism and manifestations of the left were internally attacked by Congress.  The Congress sought to dominate the terms of debate by attacking intellectuals and artists with The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).  Any leftward leaning was called Communism and we had a serious Red Scare.  This sinister committee, HUAC, was itself un-American and against American values because of its repression of free speech, freedom of assembly, and free political expression.

Back in the 1950s, HUAC’s sanctimonious attack was an attack on the USA's old left itself.  That left was different from the left of today.  The old left of the unions negotiated a middle class lifestyle for their workers.  Communism is not illegal in America. The US has an active communist movement and a legal Communist political party.  I am not one of them.  I am democratic.  I have voted Democratic with the exception of two votes: one green vote and one red vote in my youth; I have never voted Republican.  While I am traditionally an Independent, I support the Democratic Party financially every four years.  Ohioans like me used to be called “Red Indies.”  There used to be a rich tradition of independent candidacy in Ohio.  In particular, the Libertarian candidates persist.  

After the sinister 1950s, the 60s seemed a time of liberation. The counterculture represented free love and sex for mutual pleasure, as preferable to the marriage institution, a residuum of the old guard with its tradition of male authority and female subjugation.  The youth of the 60s rejected naive, nationalistic militarism (sometimes called patriotism), and burned their draft cards.  The old left continued in America and in the 1980s of my university days rejected the American government’s violent and aggressive international adventuring in Latin America in favor of a peaceful and productive approach to foreign policy based on protest and negotiation—not military force.  

While Orange County's conservative, Republican, local government of 1967 (the year of my birth) has now been superseded by a powerful Democratic bloc, Orange County was then known as one of the most conservative counties in the nation.  The far-right Birch Society, I later learned, was influential there.  South of crime plagued–but socially liberal–Los Angeles County, Orange County was known as a Republican enclave.  The neighborhood of Rossmoor was an enclave within an enclave–a walled community within the invisible, but thoroughly policed, boundaries of Orange County itself.

It was Nixon’s well armed “silent majority” that won the battle between the counterculture, with its peaceful flowers in the barrels of their guns protests and the weaponized state with its monopoly on state sanctioned violence: the police, the national guard, and the military.  The crisis of poverty and inequality, the middle class is shrinking in America and growing in China, has gotten worse.  This crisis encourages a return to LBJ’s War on Poverty and FDR’s New Deal.  

You know, if organized differently, the mighty USA could be a post-scarcity economy.  It has a massive, for Earth, Gross Domestic Product.  If its wealth was redistributed and working hours reduced,  it would be possible for everyone to be comfortable.  It would only require a reduction in the unnecessary and massive yearly expense on the military and an adjustment of the tax rate which presently favors the very rich.  This could produce a society of universal health care, improved education, and increased comfort for all.  Stanley Aronowitz has written on this notion of the “post scarcity economy.”

The media of 1967 was conflicted about the war in Vietnam.  The televised political spectrum had not yet been shifted to the right by decades of neoconservative right and neoconservative left administrations.  The television of the Vietnam War recorded anti-war protests, killings, murders, and live images of combat and death in Vietnam.  The violent  imagery sickened the viewers of television to the savagery of war.  The television, with its live presentation of violence at home and a world away, inspired the people towards pacifism and away from state violence.  When Walter Cronkite said the war in Vietnam could not be won, the US viewers took heed.  

In the 1980s, like some of my contemporary students, I admired the hippies of the summer of love in San Francisco.  While I never toured with The Grateful Dead, some from my generation did.  They would spend their youthful 1980s summers following the long-influential Dead from show to show.  They camped out in the thousands at the site of each new concert.  This community of hippies, of which I was never really a part, athough I went to several shows, affected the music to which I listened and inspired me in college.  An early exposure to The Beatles had already led me to value the countercultural ethics of 1960’s.

To many, the hopes and dreams of the 60s were smashed by the police at the Chicago Democratic National Convention and by the national guard in Ohio at Kent State.  This violent repression, this domination in the face of liberation, was more typical of the police and national guard than of the protesters–many of whom were inspired by the nonviolent, protest philosophy of Martin Luther King.  The protesters were beaten in Chicago.  In Ohio, they were killed.

Ian Fleming’s spy thrillers became popular films in the 1960s (his first novel, Casino Royale, was published in 1952).  James Bond, that “commander,” with a lethal global reach, was one side of a binary opposition whose other side was the bohemian, flamboyantly dressed, pro peace, free loving, dope smoking hippie.  

Wasn't this the dialectic of domination and liberation writ large?  Bond was a suit-clad assassin of the state and killed in its name.  007’s double aught designation indicated that he had global kill authority as far as the U. K. was concerned. 

The hippies, on the other hand, were pro peace and were opposed to the existent status quo because their government’s military was bombing and killing millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotians in their name.  Many hippies met with repression and persecution and  left the USA for Canada (like slaves on the underground railroad) or India (inspired by the Buddhists there who reject violence).

These polar opposites, Bond and the hippies, seemed to me to represent the dialectical edges of the  spectrum of heroism in the 60s: one right wing, death bringing, a global emissary of state murder and suave male supremacy, and the other, left wing, pacifistic, humanist, creative, and locally based. 

I have learned that the extreme poles of the state’s political spectrum are conjoined.  On the right wing side, there is genocidal, slavery-based, state Naziism, with its systematic liquidation of Jewish people and its murder of liberal politicians, left intellectuals, Gypsies, and the LGBTQ community.  In America, Nazis are the right wing’s shock troops, and I have been exposed to their threats of  violence.

On the left wing side, militant Communism failed to become liberation when transposed to the state form and became instead a genocidal, authoritarian police state under Stalin.  Stalin, like Hitler, went on to kill millions to consolidate his control of the state.  The two polar opposite, yet conjoined, figures in politics are Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. The problem is in the solidification of the state form in the figure of a dictator.  Might does not make right, so the first thing these two dictators did was to co opt the Law.

These two opposites unite, as Hannah Arendt would explain in The Origins of Totalitarianism, in their shared “totalitarianism,” a word she coined.  They sought to control every aspect of human life.  Totalitarianism is when the state controls every aspect of its citizens lives like in Brave New World, 1984, or even Flowers for Algernon.  Hitler institutionalized Naziism in state form.  He favored the SS and the Gestapo.  Stalin controlled the police and the assassin who killed the Revolution’s general Trotsky. Today, all the statues celebrating Stalin have been removed from Russia.  They are ahead of the USA’s program to remove statues which celebrate Confederates.  In Russia, statues of Marx and Lenin remain.

Picasso, the modernist whose work nearly everyone admires, was a lifelong communist—a proud everyman. He was a man of expert training who could produce a photographically realistic painting of a still life or a photorealistic portrait in paint, as easily as he could produce in the different schools of abstract painting.  Picasso just kept working in whatever mode was then emergent.  He amassed a stash of valuable art. The lifelong communist Picasso was also a shrewd art world capitalist.

I have never considered myself a communist, although I once taught a little Marx and look at the world from a poor man’s perspective I suppose.  I do admire the communists’ humanitarian, anti-racist, pro-woman, anti-exploitation, and collective ethics while the ideals of Naziism, and the reality of Communism in state form, repel me.  

There was no room for dissent with the Nazis or the Stalinists.  The dissenters were killed by the SS or by the police.  There was no room for dissent amongst the Soviets.  Trotsky, although instrumental in the Bolshevik revolution, was killed with an ice pick by an assassin from Stalin in Mexico.  Nazis and Communists, who hate each other,  shared techniques like the manipulation of the media, xenophobia, military-industrialism, naked territorial aggression, the condemnation of minority groups, strict censorship of the press, the systematic repression and expulsion of artists and intellectuals,and slave labor.  All these techniques should repel and demand revolt.

America, both right and left, plunged in the rightward direction in 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated.  Politicians in America now spurn immigrants for corrupting our so-called racial purity just like Hitler did in his vicious oratory.  

Obviously, politicians in America, both right and left, hope for the American Nazi vote and the Nazi gold that comes with it—both domestic and foreign.  American politicians who deploy Nazi rhetoric are unacceptable.  We fought WWII for a reason.  American politicians who torture, kill, and sodomize those who are opposed to them politically are unacceptable.  They are tainted by Naziism and should be hanged for treason.

My liberal arts training was dedicated to the formation of an anti-fascist intellect.  If there is a little fascist in each of us, desperately trying to control the uncertainty and impermanence of our environment, as the French philosopher and psychiatrist, Deleuze and Guattari, maintain, then the goal of education ought to be the erasure of this fascistic personality trait in all of us.  It resides in our lizard core.  For it is possible to grow, through education in the liberal arts, beyond the petty hatred of difference.  We educators must educate the cerebellum until it is strong enough to prevail over the lizard core’s instinctive and violent reactions.

Leave the manipulators behind and choose for yourself, with curiosity and council, how you educate yourself.  Embrace, don’t reject, different people and different cultures.  Isn’t this the sense of the U2 tune, “I believe in the kingdom come, when all the colors bleed into one.”  I envy African Americans for their dark skin.  I wish I had a tint.  Sometimes, I feel like a pale cave mushroom.  I sunburn easily.  See Bruce Sterling's 1998 science fiction novel Islands in the Net which concludes with the main characters shifting their tint.

Certainly my predilection for the old left wing, and alarm at the right and present "left," was confirmed in graduate school by an intensive reading in the Frankfurt School.  These Jewish exiles in America, who fled Nazi Germany, helped to explain the 60s to itself, particularly with the publication of Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man in 1964.

Marcuse argues that advanced industrial societies have developed a new form of social control that he calls “one dimensionality.” This form of control is characterized by the suppression of dissent, the narrowing of the range of acceptable thought and behavior, and the integration of individuals into a system that serves the interest of the ruling class (One-Dimensional Man, "Introduction").

This critique of “social control” was typical of the period. This is not boilerplate Marxism at all--although Marcuse retains the term “ruling class."  Is the term “ruling class” still useful?  We must recognize and hold up for critique that assemblage of the investor class, the military, the given administration, the various religions, and the media’s effects on those who do not think for themselves and naively treat media propaganda as truth.  

I don’t watch live TV except for sports.  There are some television programs I have enjoyed in the past like Star Trek, MASH, Northern Exposure, and Sex and the City.  Cultivate your mind, through reading and reflection.  Search for non-commercial sources of information.  Reject passive obedience to the “neon God they made (Simon and Garfunkel)” or Linkin Park’s “Emptiness Machine.”  As for television’s entertainment value, I prefer reading, writing, YouTube (it's worth it to pay for zero advertising), the occasional five minute video game of Rocket League, and, in a perfect world, a daily film.  Silence is golden; most television is a stressful racket.

Marcuse’s analysis of the new forms of social control are more pertinent to America than old forms of Marxist terminology.  Marcuse sought new ways to describe the social terrain.  The hippies dissented from the Cold War military line and expanded the realm of political discussion. They refused “integration” into a system that seemed to guarantee only their subjugation.

These qualifications of social theory by Marcuse in 1964 were an effort to make the old left relevant on a new historical stage. While I find the new terms of Marcuse’s sociology useful to understand America, I am not a communist.  I have been influenced by Marx the materialist and by Marxist literary theory (like that of my former professor, the MLA stalwart, Fredric Jameson and that of my former professor Paul Bové, who taught me Gramsci).  Personally, I am an aesthete, not a politician.  I have never been approached by the Communist Party.  I have never been part of a Communist cell.  I have been allied with the banks all my adult life.  I have used the bank's plastic since age eighteen.  With what little I have, I am a saver and a consumer on a budget.

The terrain of conversation has shifted.  I don’t even consider the Cold War relevant in today’s multipolar world.  Ukraine is hot but there is an effort to cool it down.  Russia–Ukraine wouldn't be so fraught were it not for the multipolar implications of the entire situation.  Does the Ukraine Russia War contribute to the solidification of the Russian Chinese alliance?  The notion of the Cold War is a reduction of the multipolar situation to a binary opposition while the reality of the world is far more complex.  What are we going to do about the multinational BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) currency.  This new currency will be bigger than the US dollar at its inception and will presumably become a preferred reserve currency and add further pressure to de-dollarization.

When did a government assassin like James Bond become a hero?  Now it's a genre, but how is it edifying?  Some say murder and assassination are necessary weapons of foreign policy.  I’m not so sure, but I am sure that this point of view leaves me uncomfortable.  It is certainly advisable, unless the simple goal of the movies is to recruit for the CIA, to discourage assassination as a technique of foreign policy. 

The assassinations and coups sponsored by the United States in Latin America have come back to haunt the USA.  Few in Latin America (except the exploitative, Amazon rainforest burning, oligarchs), wants to work with the Americans anymore. The United States has caused too much trouble with their strong arm tactics.  Latin America now prefers Chinese loans and development, bridges and highways, to American control.  Assassinations and coups in Latin America have driven South America to the Chinese who now build roads without busting the bank of the developing nations that they are helping.  The United States came with hurt and support for authoritarians like Pinochet.  We are a football nation and see the sport as a metaphor for our former strategic, tactical, and military dominance in foreign policy.  To wage peace, we must stop interacting with less powerful countries in an authoritarian way (read the Library of America's War No More of which I will write more later).  The South Americans have options, and increasingly they are turning to the Chinese for internal infrastructural development and, as the Chinese well know, for their vision of time is more far reaching than that of the youthful United States, this is only the start.  

Where did it all begin, this celebration and thematization of the deadly spy?  Hollywood loves spy movies and the Bond movies were, for a time, its most profitable franchise.  Did the star image of the assassin start elsewhere with the cloak and dagger bomber of Joseph Conrad in The Secret Agent?  Or was it maybe somewhere among Dostoyevsky's possessed in The Demons?

I admire the hippies of the late-60s in a way that I don’t admire Bond.  I lived personally as a long haired, Patchouli scented, peace loving, love making, rocking and rolling, left wing voting, granola chomping, mountain bike riding, hippie of a kind–when the hippies were in vogue in the 1980s while I was on campus as an undergraduate.  Graduate school in the 1990s was more punk and grunge infused.  Although I listened to mostly Classical music in my 1990s graduate school days, I heard grunge on car radio and thought it significant and catchy.

President Ronald Reagan and then Bush were in power while I was in high school and on campus. Bush had been Reagan’s Vice President and became President following Reagan.  This seemed to give electoral approval to our outrageously aggressive and criminal conduct in Latin America.  Vice President, then President Bush had been director of the CIA during this bloody period.  I had to struggle with these ideologues of far-right realpolitik in the 1980s just as the hippies of the 60s had to struggle with Reagan the Californian Governor.  I was a kid when we were Reagan-Bushed.  My first adult vote was for Dukakis.  I thought he appeared just fine in a tank and who could resist the opportunity to drive a M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tank anyway?

The 1980s revival of the Grateful Dead, who epitomized the Bay area hippie scene in the 60s, only strengthened with their release of a popular 1987 studio album titled  In the Dark.  Their new tune “Touch of Grey” received national radio airplay, a music video on MTV, and would become the Grateful Dead 's only top 40 hit. 

In 1987, I was at Duke University.  I think that I bought this CD and listened to it after I moved off campus my Junior year. I was already interested in the Dead’s early albums.  I collected some of their albums in Compact Disc format.  I also collected their live bootleg cassette tapes. 

I hope to have maintained some of the hippie’s ethics. Certainly, they were an early influence.  The Beatles, in the domains of pacifism and free love, appealed to me as a teenager.  I don't pay for love, I play for love.  The hippies ideal of love, that sentimental nostrum which they share with pop music generally, some kind of bizarre celebration of codependency, is something that I may never experience again as an individual.   

I really am a loner.   I have been burned by love.  I am most comfortable alone.  I do consider shared struggle more valuable than the limited political options of a twin party state though I am not one to man the barricades.  I consider myself obliged to be a critical patriot—not a naive one. Because I have had every opportunity in life, I feel obligated to represent the less fortunate.  To me, the hippies and their counterculture represented something more than fashion.  They had an ethical dimension.

While I had shoulder length hair in college, I now wear my hair short. I am no skinhead, but celebrate difference, the love of the other, instead of the racist violence of those who hate difference.  I crop my hair for reasons of sobriety, cleanliness, and modesty as the Buddhists I admire do.

I frequently wear all black.  I am in morning because of all the horror in the world.  Ultimately, I am an artist and an informed critic.  I believe critical patriotism is more difficult than simple or naïve patriotism with its associations with our capable military violence which should only be used for defense.

When power becomes institutionalized, it usually demands criticism and revolt.  “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is proverbial.  Fortunately, in the USA we have checks and balances.  The Supreme Court, the Bicameral Congress, and the Presidency check and balance each other.  Does wearing a hoodie make me a revolutionary? No, but my antifascism is a result of my education in the history of WW2 and my personal experience as an outspoken opponent of the Nazis who are still present in the world today.  In the words of WW2, the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.

I have internalized Bond as well as the ethos of the hippies so that I have become, like all Americans confused by their exposure to Hollywood film, an uncomfortable admixture of these incompatible polar extremes of 60s representation: the nonviolent hippy who desired liberation from state oppression and Bond whose violent domination as a straight shooting assassin I also understand.

The Angel of Dresden sits atop a fine arts building and is on the covers of both Lemonade and Applesauce. This is the the rebuilt statue honoring the arts in post-Nazi, anti-Nazi Dresden–a city in Germany.  I hope you don’t think my choice is simplistic or naive. 

The Dresden city center was destroyed in an Allied firebombing campaign. A compact civilian city center was firebombed and the human beings, mostly civilian refugees at the time, were horribly burned to death.  Do ideological differences justify this kind of death by fire in what was called a “terror bombing” by even the Allied command?  To understand, I consulted britannica.com on the subject of the Dresden air raids.

Throughout the war, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had called for increased British air raids against the population centres of Germany in order to swamp German authorities and services, particularly transportation, with hordes of refugees.  As the Allied forces closed in on the Third Reich in 1945, such targets became more feasible because of the air superiority and improved navigation techniques of the Anglo-American bomber force.

Before World War II, Dresden was called “Florence on the Elbe” and was considered one of the world’s most beautiful cities because of its architecture and art treasures.  Having never previously been attacked in the war, the city offered increased value for terror bombing against an inexperienced population.  On the night of February 13, the British Bomber Command hit Dresden with an 800-bomber air raid, dropping some 2,700 tons of bombs, including large numbers of incendiaries.  Aided by weather conditions, a firestorm developed, incinerating tens of thousands of people.  The U.S. Eighth Air Force followed the next day with another 400 tons of bombs and carried out yet another raid by 210 bombers on February 15.  It is thought that some 25,000–35,000 civilians died in Dresden in the air attacks, though some estimates are as high as 250,000, given the influx of undocumented refugees that had fled to Dresden from the Eastern Front.  Most of the victims were women, children, and the elderly.

While I don’t understand the value of “terror bombing,” maybe the English of the Battle of Britain do.  I sympathize with all victims of terror including the English Londoners whose desire for revenge must have been acute. 

The German refugees in Dresden, so rich in the tradition of art, western philosophy, and literature, were burned alive.  Dresden represented a center of culture, a “Florence on the Elbe.”  How can I sympathize with Nazi’s? I don’t sympathize with the Nazi’s.  They made lampshades out of Jewish flesh.  The Germans who were burned alive in Dresden were civilian refugees.  They were human beings.

The angel of Dresden culture, prominently featured on the cover of my first two books Lemonade and Applesauce, was rebuilt, after the war, in a Germany from which Nazis had been purged, atop the Dresden fine arts building.  

The Angel of Dresden culture represents to me the persistence of creativity and culture after the nihilism and savagery of war. It is not just any angel. It is an angel of culture. It blows the horn of music and wears the gown and laurels of western erudition, culture, and the arts.

I have visited Dresden. The city center has been painstakingly rebuilt.  As you can imagine from the covers of Lemonade and Applesauce the Dresden fine arts building is a show stopper.  This reflection is personal to me.  I visited Dresden on a Viking river cruise of the Elbe River that voyaged from Prague to Berlin.  It was an excellent cruise and I recommend it.  I found the rebuilt city of Dresden and its reconstructed art museum inspirational–for it was rebuilt after near total destruction during the Allied bombing raids of WW2.  Kurt Vonnegut wrote on this subject in Slaughterhouse 5.

In my first successful attempt at a book length publication, Lemonade of 2023 published under my initials DSK, I rewrote my original and anarchic Konflagrations of 1995, written in my twenties, with the responsibility of a man of age 55 and titled it Konflagrations Revised. I am no bomb thrower though I wrote a character who was one in the original (unpublished) version of Konflagrations.  I wrote out the bomb throwing in my revised revision.  I am not really an activist.  I do not man the barricades.  I merely write.  I think the characters in Konflagrations and Konflagrations Revised are original.  

Do I identify with the Nazi’s?  Never.  I identify with the civilian human beings who were killed in Dresden with incendiary bombs.  They were mostly refugees and I have known the life of a homeless refugee.  

I identify with the Germans of western philosophy, never the Nazis, because some of my philosophical education has been in western philosophy and some of it has been in the philosophy written in the German language tradition.  Most of the German philosophy I am familiar with was written at a time prior to the Nazi’s rise to power in 1931.  Recall, Heidegger’s Being & Time is a pre-Nazi book of 1927.  Most of the philosophy in the German region that I have read was written before the unification of the city states into one German state in 1871.  Hegel’s Phenomenology used to be considered required reading for a PhD in the humanities as was Being and Time.  Hegel predated Nazism like Nietzsche.  Heidegger was a German professor who didn't leave Germany when the Nazis came to power like the intellectuals of the Frankfurt School did.  Heidegger had to join the Nazis when they came to power.  It was do so or die.  Heidegger produced some remarkable works of free thinking even in his Nazi period, I am told.

The case of Heidegger is a perturbing one.  I have read Being and Time but little else of his work although I have heard that he was an interesting literary critic.  Being and Time is a titanic work of Western Philosophy which must be read by all serious students of western philosophy and by most who study literary theory.  Heidegger became a member of the Nazi Party, as a German academic subject to Hitler’s power.  

It was do so or die, for he didn’t take the trip into exile to avoid the Nazis like Adorno and Marcuse did.  I personally think Being and Time, concealed by its abstract language, is an anti-fascist book. It is opposed to the herd’s mob rule.  Aren't the Nazis pack hunters with a herd mentality that rule through domestic terrorism and murder.  I read Being & Time at the suggestion of an anti-fascist professor of mine.

Did Hitler sabotage the German spirit?  I understand Naziism in the tradition of German literature.  Wasn’t Mephistopheles (as the Devil was known in Goethe's Faust) a character that foreshadowed Nazi barbarism.  I identify Naziism with barbarism and the Devil. 

I have tried to make this apparent in my Applesauce of 2023 where I describe how I use Nietzsche, not as the Nazi’s do, but as postmodern French intellectual thought does.  The postmodern French intellectuals like Nietzsche’s rejection of anti-semitism and his rejection of German nationalism.  Both anti-semitism and nationalism are characteristics of Naziism.  The French postmodern intellectuals sought to deploy  Nietzsche for the French left and against the Nazis themselves.  I suggest we use Heidegger in the same way too.  Nietzsche and Heidegger are Existentialists.

While Nazism seems to me fundamentally evil as an American all too conscious of why we fought WW2, I sympathize with the people seeking refuge in Dresden on the night of the Allied air raid, mostly civilian refugees, that were burned to death.  I, of course, sympathize with the Londoners victimized by Hitler’s blitz too.  Hitler’s blitz was the bombing of England and London by the Nazi Luftwaffe.  England was vigorously defended by the Royal Air Force’s Spitfires.  Hitler’s air assault on England, by fighter bombers and the V2 rocket, was probably what motivated the English to hit Dresden so hard.  I sympathize with the napalmed Buddhists of Vietnam too. 

Maybe all war is savagery.  Buddhists think violence and war are horrible, but they also, in their written tradition, have sympathy for the soldier who must do what he is ordered to do.  From a pacifist’s perspective, war is savagery.  

I sympathize with all civilians killed, or maimed, or scarred by war.  To the soldier, the ultimate honor is to die in combat and I understand that too.  I sympathize with all sensitive cultures tortured by the savagery of war which destroys infrastructure and sets back progress.  Buddhism provides a middle path for those who seek personal peace and enlightenment.  

I write this as an American.  We have never had one of our cities attacked, like London or Dresden, or the destruction of the surface of a countryside, like in Vietnam, to Agent Orange and B-52s. The Civil War was, of course, catastrophic. We lost more Americans in the Civil War  than in any of America’s other military conflicts.  The Civil War cost us 630,000 dead.  Our goal was just, an end to slavery, but our methods were  savage.

So I placed the Dresden angel of culture, gloriously rebuilt in gold, on the covers of my first two books, Lemonade and Applesauce, because my work was an experiment in the beauty and truth of language in the face of war and torture.  These works seem light, but writing them was my response to being tortured.  These books were hard won.  Both books, and now this memoir, are battle born. 

Chapter 2

I was born in Long Beach’s Memorial Hospital in sunny Southern California.  By the accident of birth, or by star-determined destiny, as the  astrologers maintain, I was born at 11:57 pm on November 10, 1967.  My mother had spent twenty three hours in painful labor.  I was a long awaited child.

1967, the year of my birth, was a turbulent year in the United States.  In a single year, there were race riots, as they were called then, in Detroit, Tampa, Buffalo, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Milwaukee.  The Black Lives Matter movement is nothing new, but the continuation of a long struggle for African-American safety and equality under the law.  

It was in 1984 that Tina Turner called the whole concept of western, patriarchal, Christian, romantic love into question when she exclaimed, “What’s love got to do with it?”  What does love have to do with sex?  Once again, adult emotions like care, concern and respect are preferable to a vapid concept like love.

On the legal front, 1967 proved valuable because laws banning interracial marriage were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and Thurgood Marshall, a liberal African American light, was nominated and confirmed to the Supreme Court (1967, Wikipedia).

On the reactionary and counter-emergent front, in 1967, Robert McNamara, after advocating a position for the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam, left government to become the president of the World Bank.  The United States dollar had become the world’s reserve currency of choice, and the World Bank liked the conservative anti-communist line of the United States cold war political hawks. 

Ronald Reagan, a consistent antagonist of the hippie’s counterculture, was inaugurated as governor of California in 1967 (the year of my birth).  He was later an American president of my youth in the 1980s. ^. 

Reagan, like Nixon, ran against the “threat” of the counterculture who, after all, only wanted to elevate the counter military ideals of peace and love over violence, war, and hatred. Isn't warfare the threat?  

Reagan said he found the eroticism of the counterculture offensive and their libidinal and sometimes frenzied dance “foolish.”  He preferred square dancing and cynically generalized what felt right  to him to criticize the behavior of others.  Hippy dance was a celebration of the lack of structure.  Square dancing celebrates conformity to the rules of the dance,  

While LSD was legal in the 60s, Governor Reagan came out against it and compromised Ken Kesey (famous for his celebration of LSD) on a cannabis charge.  Kesey had become a public figure when he authored the bestseller One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He became a fashion victim and political target when Tom Wolfe wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test about the early LSD parties at Kesey’s home in Palo Alto, California—home of Stanford University.  

Kesey attended Stanford.  He was first exposed to LSD as the subject of a military experiment at Stanford for which he was paid.  The parties at Keysey’s home in Palo Alto were played by the house band, the youthful Grateful Dead.  The parties were awash with groovy music and legal LSD.  Kesey, who was known for his promotion of psychedelic drugs, had to sit out 1967’s heavily televised, summer of love.  He was serving a five month prison term on a cannabis charge.

I am sensitive to this.  I legally use marijuana as part of a state of Ohio medical marijuana program that has been in effect since 2016.  I joined the Ohio Medical Marijuana Registry when it began in January, 2019.  Ohio voted in November 2023 for recreational marijuana law.  Marijuana is now legal for anyone to buy and smoke in Ohio as long as they are over 21.

People who don’t have my legal credentials, a state medical marijuana card that must be renewed yearly, are going to prison for using a drug that the State of Ohio regards as a beneficial miracle medicine useful in the treatment of more than twenty five maladies. 

Cannabis is the Latin term for marijuana.  Marijuana is the Spanish term for dope.  Cannabis is the term used by medical professionals. I am legally permitted to use medical cannabis because it relieves chronic pain.  I suffer from body pains and a chronically painful, arthritic shoulder.  Medical marijuana is prescribed to me by a medical doctor to be used as a pain reliever for chronic pain.

Reaganism, institutionalized in the California governorship in 1967 and later invoked nostalgically by the Republicans, has become my political nemesis.  I reject Reaganism and the authoritarianism of the 1950s that Reaganism celebrates. To Reaganism’s abandonment of the role of good government in the name of the exploitation of labor and the extraction of capital thinly masked by patriotism and paternalism, I would counterpose that advocate for imaginative responses to crisises, that sympathizer with the poor, and that experimenter with planned proactive government, FDR.  

But in the 1980s of my teenage youth, Happy Days was on television.  It ran from 1974 to 1984 and it celebrated the Reaganite ideals of the 1950s (Wikipedia).  The suburban nuclear family, the father knows best tone, the high school limitations of most of its protagonists, and its venerable and sage been-there-don’t-do-that wisdom of the Fonz, located the 1980s sitcom firmly in the 1950s. 

The Fonz dispensed wisdom with father-like authority and a cool attitude. This leather jacketed motorcyclist, so different from Brando’s wild one, seemed to justify the extension of the patriarchy into the rebel pop field of suburbia. The Fonz character showed the limitations of televised rebellion.  There was a saying in the 60s, “The revolution will not be televised.”

Later, when a graduate student in the 1990s, I learned that some of my students in graduate school called me the Fonz. This might have something to do with my uniform at the time. I wore black Doc Marten leather boots, Levi 501s, a black leather belt with a wide chrome buckle, a black Land’s End v-neck T-shirt, and a black leather NYC Schott leather jacket.  Often, I would wear a black beret.  This was my teaching uniform in the shoulder seasons.  When it rained and in the winter I wore a North Face fleece that zipped into a black Gore-Tex shell.  Some called me “Preacher.”

In the 1980s of my youth, I would sometimes watch a program called CHIPS about two police motorcycle officers.  Like Happy Days, this was a long running program that connected the 1970s with the 1980s.  CHIPS ran from 1977 to 1983 (CHIPS, Wikipedia).  In it, two police officers of different races worked together and were friends off work too.  This was part of California cool.  This celebration of difference made a cop drama–based on the formula of crime, chase, arrest–progressive.

The two partners were named Ponch and Jon and they were part of the California Highway Patrol.  They rode Kawasaki motorcycles.  Ponch, the Puerto-Rican played by Erik Estrada (originally from a Harlem theater background), had a flair for disco dancing and was the hot head of the two.  Jon, the level headed Vietnam veteran, was his straight shooting partner.  “The series shared its Saturday time slot with other shows such as The A-Team, Knight Rider, and Magnum, P.I (see Wikipedia.com an online, often updated encyclopedia available as an app on your smartphone and/or computer devices).”  

The show was filmed on LA freeways that were in the process of being built (I learned in Wikipedia).  The show was a work in progress that extended what it meant to be LA cool. In the 1980s, Okies were out, and the police were in. The new California cool was represented as a friendliness between the different races and a firm but California casual relationship between the police and the citizenry.  Ponch and Jon were friends.  

What I see as valuable in the study of the global liberal arts generally, is the study of different literary traditions beyond the traditional white male Anglo-American archive of the past,  

The study of literature in the different literary traditions of the world, including what used to be called the Third World, qualifies the provincial, parochial, racist nationalism of the archive of the American white fathers.  Archie Bunker, with memorable Meathead, for grounded the conflict of the generations while CHIPS indicated the possibility of equanimity.

The filming of CHIPS was not without incident.  In the fifth season, Erik Estrada, Ponch in the show, went on strike for a better syndication deal. He was replaced for three shows and went back to work.  Estrada did not escape the perils of motorcycling.  He fractured some ribs and broke both wrists in one fall for some reason.  

I am leery of motorcycle riding.  I have a surgically reconstructed spine that might not enjoy a spill.  When I was thinking about buying a Honda Cub, the most popular motorcycle ever built, my mother bought me a Subaru.  

Back in the year of my birth, 1967, Hollywood released some strange new movies that seemed to reflect the tension in the land between the poets and the police.  Bonnie and Clyde and In Cold Blood were released in 1967.  Both the counterculture and the police were represented in 60s Hollywood films.  Villains become heroes, heroes become villains, sexual liberation registered in revealing and sexy new fashion trends, and promiscuity became fashionable with the new availability of the birth control pill.  All these new modes were reflected in the films of the day. 

I earned my master's degree from Pitt’s English department in 1993.  I taught and studied from 1993-1998 as a doctoral candidate and Teaching Assistant.  My dissertation was to be on Hollywood films in the 1960s.  This shift to popular culture stemmed from an egalitarian impulse to expand the scope of my criticism beyond the literary and textual to embrace popular American film.

For a time, I thought that I might write a dissertation about Hollywood films in the 1960s.  I was interested in the ways that the counterculture was represented in the Hollywood films of the period.  I also wanted to see the ways in which the backlash against the 60s registered in Hollywood films like the end of Easy Rider.  

I left graduate school in 1998 before I finished my PhD, but I may yet write a book on 60s cinema conceived globally.  Hollywood produced some interesting films in the 60s but so did Japan, Italy, France, and England.

Probably nothing was more polarizing in the 60s than the war on Vietnam.  The films of the sixties could not help but reflect the social turmoil between the counterculture and those in uniform: be they corporate navy blue suits, police blue, the national guard, or the military with their camouflage.

I led a sheltered life.  I would only come to learn about the Vietnam war later in films like Hamburger Hill, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket and The Deer Hunter.  Later still, I began to peruse the journalism of the Vietnam war period in the two volumes of American journalism about the Vietnam war published by The Library of America that are in my personal research library.  These two collections of journalism are arranged chronographically so that the readers reads the history of the war from beginning to end as they read through the two volumes in order.

In the face of war, I also recommend the work of American pacifist writing War No More (also published by the same highly respected publisher, The Library of America).  This book of primary American pacifist writing ranges from the Iroquois to modernity.  

The book provides many thoughtful examples of American pacifist writing and suggests that the invocation to wage peace is not naive, but fundamental to a new way of imagining a  world without war.  The goal for our planet Earth should be to end war.  This vision of prioritizing peace has been here all along in the repressed and neglected texts of American peace writing collected in War No More.

Can a violent film be considered an anti-war film?  Does the presentation of violence innur people to its gravity, like in the cartoons, or does the representation of violence demand revolt because the goal is a more peaceful world.

Apocalypse Now was a co-creation of John Milius, who wrote the novel the film was based on, and Francis Ford Coppola, the film’s co-writer and director.  John Milius wrote and revised the screenplay for Apocalypse Now for years before it was adapted into a film.  Milius had read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, about a river journey to the end of empire in the African Congo as an American teenager, and deliberately did not re-read it for the film.  He wanted to remember it as a psychedelic dream memory.  

Coppola, on the other hand, sometimes approached the direction of the film with an annotated edition of Heart of Darkness in his hand. Conrad’s novella, to which the film alludes, also contains a river journey like Apocalypse Now’s river journey.  

Coppola amplified the psychedelic visual style of Milius’ text, and together they created a hallucinogenic, anti-war film for the ages.  Psychedelia was emergent and Michael Herr had remarked on the hallucinogenic and fluid experience of warfare for the soldiers who fought the Vietnam in his remarkable collection of journalism, Dispatches.

Milius went on to write and direct Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn.  Red Dawn, with its red scare paranoia so typical of the 1980s of its release and of my youth, I liked for its audacity and disliked for its polarizing perspective and jingoism. 

In the film, teenage American guerrilla fighters try to repel a Soviet invasion of their American hometown.  This right wing, paranoid romp, blacklisted him with the Hollywood left, Milius said, and it was for this reason, Milius said, that he became underworked (Wikipedia). 

On the emergent side of things, in 1967 anti-war protests ramped up with the escalation of the war in Vietnam.  Hippies celebrated the summer of love in the Haight-Ashbury district.  The Haight was a progressive community in the city of San Francisco near a large wooded park that ran from city to sea.  Prior to the summer of love, no-one bothered to lock their doors in the Haight.  There was a free health clinic and food relief for those who needed it. 

Many heeded Timothy Leary and took the LSD acid test while grooving to The Grateful Dead’s psychedelic music, an organic expression of the 1960s Bay Area, as was Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Quicksilver, and many other bands that were supported by the youth movement there.  

The “Summer of Love” was put under the television microscope and misjudged.  Then, Haight Ashbury changed.  Drifters arrived in Haight Ashbury with no shoes.  Amphetamine and heroin dealers began to prey on the inexperienced.  Most of the original population moved on.  

In my first sight of the famous intersection Haight and Ashbury, as a tourist, I noticed that one quarter of the intersection housed a retail Gap store.  On a later visit, I noticed that some of the punks sitting on the sidewalk wore black plates the size of roof shingles from their belts to cover their butts.  They sat on the sidewalk or in the park.  

On one visit, I noticed there was a McDonalds across the street from the park.  On another visit, I traversed the entire park with someone newly met—starting in the American Youth Hostel in Union Square and trekking through the park all the way to the beach.

In my last visit through that fated neighborhood, I observed it from atop a tourists’ double decker bus.  The bus took its customers effortlessly (for walking the hills of San Francisco can be tiring) through memorable neighborhoods in the city of San Francisco while a guide explained the historical significance of the neighborhoods on the buses audio system.  When I rode this open air double decker bus through Haight-Ashbury, I noticed two men walking side-by-side wearing nothing but condoms.  I am amused, but still a little shocked, by the memory.

What do we make of this emphasis on “love” in the summer of love?  It is crucial to the understanding of the early pop appeal of The Beatles, to much of the music of the 1960s, and to pop music since that has explored the themes of sex, relationships, and romantic love.  

There was a loving eroticism to the dance of the counterculture and to the easy promiscuity of its ways.  The action of making love was seen as opposed to the action of making war.  Some of this celebration of love and sex for mutual sexual pleasure and simultaneous orgasm, not domination or reproduction, may have been influenced by LBJ’s response to the genocidal Goldwater.  When Goldwater ran for president on the platform of nuking Vietnam, LBJ asserted in a television advertisement “We must love each other or die.”

There was a sense of fatalism in the counterculture of the 60s.  Many of the 60s youth considered the existential threat of the draft or nuclear war to be a serious one.  They advocated complete nuclear disarmament and an end to nuclear power.  The 60s youth shared the perception that they would die before they got old with the suspicion that those who wore suits and those over thirty were not to be trusted.

The Monterey Pop festival was inaugurated in 1967. The Beatles released the psychedelic Magical Mystery Tour.  Stalin’s daughter defected to the United States.  The Freedom of Information Act became effective.  The Boston Red Socks won the World Series.  Allen Ginsberg chanted to levitate the Pentagon.  Rolling Stone began publication.  Finally, in 1967, the year of my birth, the all-American Big Mac debuted in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Wikipedia.com. 1967).

The United States was coming apart at the seams during the year of my birth and it seems that I have experienced more turmoil than calm in my now late, middle age life.  I celebrate the 60s counterculture as relative to my youth, my political values and my health.  

In the 1980s of my youth, the ethics of the counterculture were under assault from the forces of reaction.  The 1980s war on drugs was a war on the remains of the 60s counterculture itself.  It is also a war of medical import since crack and heroin must be eradicated.  

Reagan took his anti hippie rhetoric nationwide when he became President.  The enemies of the hippies opposed  the counterculture’s drugs, pacifism, its support for civil rights and the women's movement, free love, and drug-fueled and libidinous rock & roll.

The sanctimonious attack on the counterculture for its use of drugs was modulated and put to use against the indigent ghetto dwellers who were often colored, poor, and defenseless.  Born by chance of birth into a social order which simultaneously sought to exploit them, repress them, or appropriate their successes, the poor were disproportionately affected by the war on drugs.  The war did not affect the high flying, cocaine-addled jet setters who ruled the growing economies of the 1980s.

The war on drugs became a war on the African American and Mexican American ghettos and barrios where cannabis use was common, cheap, and sometimes preferred to alcohol.  Marijuana is the Spanish word for cannabis. Cannabis is the Latinate word for marijuana and is preferred for medical discussions of the medicinal plant.  

Marijuana was initially made illegal in 1937.  The media at the time labeled it as a Mexican vice although it was widely used by people of all races in the Western US.  

Marijuana is not intoxicating like alcohol.  Certainly cannabis is less inebriating and more medicinal than alcohol–although during alcohol prohibition, alcoholic beverages were sold at drug stores with a prescription and were considered medicine too.  Hence, Gatsby’s fortune.  Hence the success of Walgreens where alcohol was sold as medicine during Prohibition.  Alcohol, like cannabis, is a powerful painkiller.  When I used to drink, I found vodka good in this role.  I can recall when my daily dose was five ounces of vodka.  Alcohol can cause imprecision, violence, and depression, while marijuana is peaceful and contemplative.

Cannabis is now lawful for the treatment of a variety of ailments medicinally in the majority of the states in the United States.  But when the war on drugs was escalated by Reagan, millions were imprisoned as new tactics of social control formed around a new legally institutionalized segregation based on mass incarceration, cash bail, and parole surveillance in the ghettos and barrios of America (Alexander. The New Jim Crow).  

Now, there is the conviction and political willpower to restore to the black and brown communities tax monies from the sale of legal cannabis, release those imprisoned for simple marijuana possession, and expunge the records of non-violent marijuana law violators. 

Hundreds of millions of charitable dollars now go to prison reform.  The war on drugs has been defunded and its ideology has been undercut by the successful effort to legalize cannabis state by state.  Marijuana was recently rescheduled Federally.  It is now considered medicinal and is no longer in the same category as those blights and scourges cocaine and heroin.

+

Ohio, where I presently reside, recently voted to move beyond medical cannabis to legalize marijuana recreationally.  Many people simply don't vacation in cities where legal marijuana coffee shops, bars, and restaurants do not exist.  Tourists like options.   Those tourists mean money.  A marijana high is contemplative and bright, not like an alcohol high which can be glum, sloppy, and violent.  Marijuana tourists are good consumers and the cities in the state of Ohio will benefit, especially when those tourists need a restaurant to conquer the munchies.

Recreational law is good for business.  Imagine restaurants where you can purchase cannabis infused food and drink.  Imagine bars, coffeeshops, and nightclubs where varieties of cannabis can be ordered and smoked, bonged, vaped, or eaten.  Imagine gardening your own marijuana plants for the price of a pack of seeds.  These civil liberties, common in other cannabis states governed by recreational law, are now legal in Ohio 

The war on drugs intensified with Reagan who began to shift large federal monies to local police departments for drug busts and arrests.  At the same time, the Reagan government encouraged the provisioning of local police departments with military armaments, body armor, armored cars, and even tanks.  They needed them to fight the war on drugs since many dealers equipped themselves with illegal automatic weapons.  

The local police departments got richer and richer, and better equipped to fight a war, the more arrests they made. The local police were in the money when they got legal authorization to profit further from the drug war’s privileged political situation and retain cash and property seized in drug busts.  Local police departments profited from the federal government’s political decision to make drugs an issue, before which drug busts had been a minor part of policing and not high on the police’s priority list.  

When the administration's tone and support escalated and the police weaponized, so did the cartels.  In a cruel irony, the cartels began to purchase military grade weapons in America where they were more easy to purchase.  The term “war” was self-actualizing and the cartels now come to the field with the most potent military weapons and political connections.

Marijuana legalization reduces the burden on the police.  It is good policy and most police would say they prefer marijuana users to alcohol abusers and certainly to crack, cocaine, and heroin abusers.  

Reagan and Nixon made an issue of drugs because some of their political opponents used drugs, particularly the hippies and the minorities.  Since the hippies were visibly different and contemptuous of the draft and the militarized state, Reagan and Nixon thought they could encourage fear and dislike for the hippies on the basis of normativity and on the basis of a naively intolerant patriotism. 

When the hippies were forced out of the country, this attack on the hippies shifted to an attack focused on colored people.  Republican hatred at the new expressions of the 60s, one being anti establishment and drug fueled rock & roll, was redirected into the fear and hatred of colored people as rock & roll transformed into an established mass cultural  industry.  The Republicans exploited the images of urban unrest and black power in the sixties.  African Americans, and particularly African American men, became the Republicans’ political enemies, foils, and straw-men.  Witness Willie Horton.

Now that the liberal 60s have been vanquished by decades of neoconservative rule, politicians still rely on the primitive but politically effective fear of the racial other and, put more generally, the hatred of difference common to so many primitive people. The left wing embraces the American plurality.  

Since Reagan and Nixon represented the state, and people want to believe their state is “good,” the militaristic part of the state sought to situate the hippies as “bad,” when, during the Vietnam war in the 60s and during the outrages in Latin America in the 1980s by Republican administrations, it was impossible to say that the state, with its international carnage and domestic repression, was anything like “good.”  

It was not until Barack Obama’s presidency that these legal complications began to ease.  Obama was the first president to speak of prison reform in years.  Even Clinton had always tried to represent himself as tough on crime.  While President Obama did not go so far as the position which advocates the abolition of prisons entirely, or the position which advocates the total end to drug prohibition, as some on the global left do, he really couldn’t.  Within the United States political context, he focused on meaningful reform. 

Obama was the first sitting President to visit a federal corrections facility, the first to see a drop in the federal prison population … His administration enacted significant policy changes, including … legislation reducing sentencing disparities involving crack and powder cocaine, a temporary ban on federal contracts with private prisons, and limitations on the transfer of military equipment to local police departments (Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, “Preface to the Tenth Anniversary Edition.”).

Obama had the Representatives and the Senators united against him.  The “Tea Party” candidates were elected in a racist reaction to the election of Obama because he was our first African American president.  It is a wonder that Obama got any work done at all, let alone his successful health care program that relieved a heavy burden on so many Americans.  He thought seriously about the prison system.  He walked his talk and some real reforms were made.  

When Trump came to power in 2016, through a maneuver with the Electoral College, the new president had actually lost the election in the popular vote by nearly three million votes. 

The Electoral College is a residual institution that was originally formed to protect slavery in the slave states.  It is anti-democratic because it is not proportional.  Tiny Rhode Island has the same weight as a big state like California–even though California’s population is far more extensive than Rhode Island’s population, for example.  The same would be true if we compared massive New York with tiny Wyoming.  Thus the Electoral College is not proportional and so anti-democratic.  

Like a Confederate statue, the Electoral College is a residual racist institution.  It should be abolished.  The Electoral College is anti-democratic and dangerous.  It has been used to affect minority rule .

Neoconservatism is really a moral order of God (in most cases the Roman Catholic Church), country, and family.  We have learned how these institutions were celebrated by Mussolini’s fascist state.  This is the ghost of Mussolini that haunts us still.  Neoconservatism is a moral system that leads to fascism, for where is there a place for the atheist, the skeptic, the critical patriot, or even the single life, amidst these noxious and normative values that were used to justify fascism.

Neoliberalism is different from neoconservatism.  Neoconservatism is a moral order; neoliberalism is an economic mode of governance typified by the privatization of state institutions.  Neoliberalism isn’t “liberal” at all.  Nor is it universal.  

The roots of neoliberalism are with Chile’s Pinochet.  When the Chilean presidential palace was bombed by the Chilean air force and the democratically elected socialist president of the country, Dr Allende, assassinated with a single bullet to the head in a Nixon/Kissinger/CIA coup, Pinochet came to power.  Pinochet moved to institute neoliberal policies. 

When general Pinochet took power, through the violent overthrow of a democratically elected President, he moved to privatize the public sector and reward the Americans, the Chilean air force (who had bombed Dr Allende in the presidential palace), and the rich oligarchy that had supported Pinochet in the military coup.  Neoconservatism, the privatization of the public sphere, began with Pinochet. This style of neoliberal governance and economy was not “ liberal” at all, but a result of a violent military coup.  

Neoliberalism was later adopted by Reagan and Thatcher.  Reagan increased spending on the military, lowered the top tax rate significantly and cut spending on social programs like education, housing, and social security.  Reagan alone, during his time in office, lowered the top tax rate from 73% to 28%. This is why he is so popular with the investment class. The investment class benefited enormously from his neoliberal policies. This neoliberalism enriched the investment class and led to the impoverishment of the rest of the US.

The dialectic of liberation and domination is a master figure in trying to decipher the 1960s.  I think the history of the US changed fundamentally with the assassination of JFK.  Since JFK, presidents come and go, but the military and “intelligence” deep-state has ruled the roost in the United States with its Cold War mentality and violent realpolitik.  JFK wanted to de-escalate the war on Vietnam.  He was killed for this reason.  

Chapter 3

The time of my birth made me an astrological Scorpio with the sun in transit.  While my knowledge of astrology is limited, I have learned that the Scorpio astrological sign is a water sign, fixed and negative, characterized by the scorpion, the snake, and the eagle.  

I don’t identify with any of these three beasts.  They are all carnivorous predators.  The majestic eagle, in his lonely aerie, is the most social of this group.  All three are formidable beasts.  

The scorpion, with its two forward facing claws, has a venomous stinger on the tip of its tail and may be the nastiest in this group.  It is a lethal arachnid killing machine.  

The snake slithers and has fangs and a venomous bite.  

The eagle has sharp claws, pinions, and a powerful beak for tearing flesh.  Any one of these three predators could take down a human being. 

While the scorpion is an apex predator, I don’t like predators at all, especially not predatory arachnids.  I am not a predator.  The goals of predation in humans are murder,  theft, and rape.  These are the goals of piracy, not the goals of a society based on the peaceful transition of power.  Theft and rapine are opposed by the humanist project with its stress on liberal education, social progress, and compassion for the differences of others.

Instead of the desert scorpion, I admire the otter. Found in both freshwater and saltwater, these social beasts spend their time dancing with one another.  They are always at play.  I am nothing like them, but they are fun to watch. 

I also admire the chameleons.  These adaptable creatures are at home in any environment.  Faced with a new environment, the chameleon adapts its appearance until it fits into the environment it is infiltrating.  The chameleon's skin is active camouflage. 

I identify with the humble lion.  The male lion does not hunt.  He protects the lair and the cubs there while the lionesses are out hunting.  The male lion of the pride protects the boundaries of his pride’s lair, stirring only to check his perimeter or to look after any stray cubs.  He is fierce in defense.  He is a protective creature.

Chapter 4

As is typical, I have few memories of the early period of my life when I was in my California infancy.  I could barely talk or read so I had no language for consciousness or memory.  Without language, there can be no description of memory.  Memory is structured consciousness connected and illuminated by language.  

I do remember sensations of warmth and light. The sunlight (its clarity, its lengthy stretch in the day) is intense in the southwest.  It affected me.  I grew accustomed to light and warmth and it was not until I reached New England that I would experience true winter. 

In California, artists are drawn to the sunlight, particularly painters, for the same reason the Hollywood studios once traveled to southern California (more daylight for the extension of the movie industries’ work day).  People moved to California, just as Henry James’ artists traveled to Italy, for the quality of the light.

Chapter 5

If 1967 was bad, 1968 was worse.  Our country has long fought over the memory of the sixties and much of that fight has been over the battle of the representation of 1968.  Reagan and Nixon were opposed to the 60s leftists and obstinately promoted a violent capitalism and a war-like and often criminal foreign policy that was everywhere under critique.  As Americans, we didn’t see ourselves as the rest of the world saw us: violent and self interested aggressors on the foreign policy front.

What do we make of the United States of America in 1968?  It was a time of social liberation and anti-war protest.  It was also a time of oppressive state repression and violence.  It was a time of principled pacifism versus the war to break the unbreakable spirit of the Vietnamese. 

Much of my life has been spent under neoconservative presidencies.  Nixon, Ford, Reagan, the CIA’s George Bush, his son’s holy oil Crusade against the so called Infidel, and now, Trump again. The American people elected a mafia don to the Presidency, and many good and rich Americans left the country permanently to avoid getting ripped off.

All these hard right ideologues seemed hell bent on attacking the counterculture, the old left, the secular, women, the Native-Americans, and the colored.  The countercultural leftist values of peace and free love, help for the poor, women's lib, and the African American’s quest for equality under the law, were construed as a national threat in the 60s during Reagan’s governorship, and again in the 1980s during Reagan’s disastrous presidency.  Even today, the universal demands of the Black Lives Matters’ protests are represented as threatening by Republicans.

Much of 1968 concerned the escalation of the war in Vietnam and its increasing unpopularity both domestically and internationally. In 1968, Vietnam conducted a major successful offensive to coincide with the Tet holiday.  In a foreshadowing of the end of the war, the Viet Cong attacked the United States embassy in Saigon. 

A 1968 picture of a police chief summarily executing a Viet Cong officer, caught in the act of shooting his victim in the head, made the press.  It would win the 1969 Pulitzer prize the next year and drive public sentiment even further against the war.  The atrocities of the My Lai massacre, in which 109 civilians were murdered, were revealed.  Exceeding the boundaries of Vietnam, in 1968, the US further escalated the war and bombed the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos.  

LBJ was so disgusted with the wartime atrocities on the jungle battleground because soldiers on both sides of the war had started cutting up the dead and taking body trophies like severed ears.  LBJ was so exhausted by protesters outside the White House chanting, “Hey you, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today,” all day long, and all night long, that he decided not to seek reelection. 

Opposition to the war only intensified with the escalation of the war in Vietnam.  The Catonsville 9 broke into a selective service office and burned the draft cards there with napalm.  At Columbia, students protesting the war shut down the university (1968, Wikipedia).  

1968 was a worldwide banner year.  In May of 1968, the French were on the brink of revolution.  The French students united with the French workers in a general strike that immobilized the country.  They followed through on their demands, and the French left institutionalized some real gains before state repression set in again.  

Civil rights was a hot button issue in 1968.  The Memphis sanitation strike began in that year.  The African Americans' demand for equal pay for equal work, compared with that of the white sanitation workers, met with violent opposition.  

There was a civil rights protest at a whites only bowling alley in the south.  Three student “freedom riders” were killed by southern highway patrol officers to northern outrage.  There were civil rights protests at the universities in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and in Madison, Wisconsin.  The Civil Rights Act of 1968 helped to limit housing discrimination, though discrimination still persists (Wikipedia).  

What will probably be the best recollected symbolic civil rights triumph of 1968, that those interested in liberation can recall as inspirational, was the victory of two African American sprinters at the Olympics–Tommie Smith and John Carlos (Wikipedia). 

First there had been Jesse Owens who, by winning against the Nazi’s racers in 1936, proved that the Aryan claim to white superiority was vain propaganda.  Then came the sprinters with their native to the 60s black power salute. 

Now, the enemy wasn’t only the Nazi’s, but the white supremacists in the segregated United States who seemed, at the time, to have more in common with the apartheid state of South Africa than with any other advanced democracy. The wartorn state of Israel, then and now in a deadly conflict with the Palestinians, the US, and South Africa formed an alliance of states with significant internal racial minorities. 

Both on the Mexican victory podium, the victorious sprinters humbly lowered their heads and raised an arm punctuated by a fist in the black power salute.  They were victorious, humble, and unbowed.  

With this black power salute, they declared themselves in solidarity with the militant fight for racial liberation and equality across the world.  Despite the way that white racists insulted their success, limited the scope of their accomplishments, and punished them for their heroic gestures, they had demonstrated their uncontestable world superiority in the 200 meter run.

In 60s America, the homefront segregation, the Apartheid of South Africa, and the repression of Palestinians in Israel became subject to critique.  I mention them here because this critique was so typical of the times. 

Following the violence in California, my family always lived in white communities. Because of my poverty, I have often lived with my family. I have never owned a home of my own.

By the time I studied at Duke, I was advocating divestment from South Africa.  I even had a red bumper sticker on my red Volkswagen GTI that read “Divest Now.”  

This divestment, which proved lawful and very effective, occurred in my lifetime, changed South Africa, and forced them to publicly address systemic legal racism. The physical segregation of colored people in townships, separated by open spaces from white neighborhoods still persists. 

On the women’s front, in 1968, 150 feminists protested at the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City.   Women also protested at the 1968 Republican Party Convention in Miami Beach (Wikipedia).  They saw the Republican Party as a central bastion of patriarchal (male) authority and anti-woman.  The Miss America Pageant’s vapidity and conformity with unhealthy ideals of feminine beauty were pilloried by the feminists.  Feminists rejected the objectification of women, subject to the male gaze and male control. 

The feminists rejected the objectification of women.  They saw Miss America, like Barbie, as poor role models for modern children who would have to support themselves independently instead of being supported by some man with all the unhealthy power dynamics that a conventional patriarchal marriage demanded.  The feminists of 1968 celebrated their independence from, not their desirability to, men.

The feminists of the time were everywhere confronting men who participated in patriarchal formations of oppression.  The feminists valued the woman’s sphere of cooperation, collaboration, creation, nurturing, and care, and saw it as antithetical to the male world of competition, conflict, killing, and war.  There were at least two types of feminism in the 60s: radical and cultural.

The great majority of women who presently call themselves ‘radical feminists’ in fact subscribe to a politics more accurately labeled ‘cultural feminist.’ That is, they see the primary goal of feminism as freeing women from the imposition of ‘male values,” and creating an alternative culture based on ‘female values.’ Cultural feminism is essentially a moral, countercultural movement aimed at redeeming its participants, while radical feminism began as a political movement to end male supremacy in all areas of social and economic life, and rejected the whole idea of opposing male and female natures and values as a sexist idea, a basic part of what we were fighting (The 60s Without Apologies).

When I later took a class on feminism, in Duke University’s English Department with the professor Susan Willis, I was the only male student in the class. I learned from my female peers and from my female professor to whom feminist issues were of professional and personal importance.  I have her books Specifying and A Primer on Daily Life in my personal research library.  

In addition to Susan Willis, I studied short stories with Melissa Lentricchia (who after her divorce publishes under her maiden name Melissa Malouf).  I remembered one class when I complained of the complex levels of the text but could not specify what I meant.  The class then came up with the ideas of figurative or symbolic language.  

I later took an independent study on creative writing with Professor Melissa Lentricchia and started work on a novel.  That semester-long class was the only time I have formally studied creative writing.  

Among the modern day feminists, although they might not call themselves that, I admire Congresswoman Cori Bush and Senator Alexandria-Ocasio-Cortez.  While women’s rights have established real gains since they were first brought to attention by the suffragettes and, later, the bra burning women of the sixties, women still lack the legal  protections guaranteed by an ERA.  It's high time the ERA was ratified.

1968 was a year of murder. The right and the left appeared irreconcilable, as they may be, and the right wing systematically killed off the lights of MLK, Malcolm X, and RFK.  After the MLK assassination, the country exploded.  The cities burned, and they may yet burn again for the basic needs of many African Americans are unmet.  They were brought to America against their will and forced to live as slaves.  Most still struggle daily to exist in a hostile white world.  They deserve an attempt at sympathy and real recompense. They deserve reparations.  

Violent repression also took form at the Democratic convention in 1968 Chicago when a weaponized police force smacked the skulls of anti-war protesters with batons in what some have called the end of the 60s.  A ramping up of police violence against the anti-war protesters, and an increased deployment of the sometimes lethal National Guard, destroyed the 60s counterculture’s tradition of nonviolent protest.  The quest for love, liberation, and peace was squashed by violent state repression, really across the board, and the liberal movement, with its penchant for protest, has only gradually and haltingly recovered to form the contested neoliberal consensus of today. 

We live in a country in need of change.  Millions are in prison; hundreds of thousands are homeless; those with no relief haunt our cities like zombies and eventually die.

Chapter 6

Much of the tale of 1969, starting with the 1968 television coverage of violent police repression in Chicago, continued in TV’s persistent coverage of the trial of the Chicago Seven.  The struggle between the counter hegemonic, antiwar pacifists, and the police, the war mongering politicians, the profiteering war industries, and the hawkish cold war generals, featured prominently in the television of 1969 (1969, Wikipedia).

At a Berkeley protest, the National Guard sprayed the protesters from helicopters with skin stinging powder.  In the same year, Berkeley established the People’s Park where all are welcome and all are fed.  

Public opinion had turned against the war. The National Mobilization Committee to end the Vietnam War drew hundreds of thousands of protesters.  The March Against Death in Washington DC drew many activists as sick to death of the war as the soldiers deep in the Vietnamese jungle and the civilian youth burning their draft cards. 

In good news, on the education front, in 1969 the Supreme Court ruled that freedom of speech applied to schools.  Disaster struck in Santa Barbara in 1969 when an oil spill ruined the Santa Barbara harbor and injured and/or killed aquatic and amphibious wildlife.  Public outrage over the soiling of this pristine environment was one the factors that led to Earth Day.  Earth Day was founded the very next year (1969, Wikipedia).

1969 was a conflicted year.  Many still perceived the country and the war through the lens of Cold War McCarthyite anti-communists who sought to criminalize the domestic left wing in their notorious (and now mostly reviled) House un-American Activities Committees (HUAC).  HUAC’s un-American attacks on free speech and artistic expression made it difficult to be a leftist in the 1950s.

The wholesale rejection of communism has led the United States to reject a planned economy in favor of an unregulated economy.  This has led to slower growth than the planned economy of China, for example. Even the USSR’s economy once grew more quickly than the US’s due to planned coordination.

The Manson murders occurred in 1969.  I think everyone was shocked by the brutality of the Manson murders. To associate that sick violence with the counterculture, who sought peace and love, is problematic. 

As for Manson, he revealed his true colors in prison and had a swastika tattooed on his forehead.  He is a white supremacist now.  He is not an expression of the counterculture, (though he caromed within its circles for a while as a cultist), but a Nazi renegade.  He is an expression of the fascist counterrevolutionary lusts for domination, blood, power, and control.

The counterculture was multivalent, but I was most interested in the counterculture that flowered in the summer of love and that bloomed again in Woodstock in 1969 where 500,000 assembled to celebrate the music of their generation.  These assertions  of communal unity centered around music, for, after all, they all had rock & roll to unite them. 

In contrast to the much celebrated white (Hendrix notwithstanding) Woodstock, I would call attention to the Harlem Cultural Festival.  The Harlem Cultural Festival was a series of musical acts on a stage in a Harlem Park that lasted for several weeks in 1967 and in consecutive years until their last festival in 1969 (the same year as Woodstock).  Quest Love has collected footage from the Harlem Cultural Festival and formed it into a rockumentary called Summer of Soul.  It runs on Hulu if you are interested in viewing it. 

In 1970, I began my formal education at the Little Cottonwood Nursery School.  I remember little of this time.  I recall, I looked forward to going to school.  The easy youthful conviviality I found there was my first exposure to social fulfillment outside of the traditional family unit.  I don’t recall any specific friends there, but I do remember the warmth of a comfortable youthful society of a kind in which we were encouraged to evolve socially through cooperative play.  

While most of my life has been spent in friendless solitude, I am an introvert and most comfortable and productive alone, at the time I felt just a pleasant sociability.

Memory is curious.  It is imperfect and can be temporally undecidable.  Memory is tricky. As an author of a memoir, I must avoid self-aggrandizement and self-deception.  Temporally, memory is often undecidable.  I might recall the memory of a certain event, for whatever reason (the madeleine serves to trigger Proust’s memories), but I might have difficulty remembering a memory's exact placement in the sequence of my personal history.  In search of memory knowledge we are faced with Prospero’s memory abyss, “the dark backward abysm of time (Shakespeare, The Tempest, I.ii.50).”

So while I celebrate the perspective of older years, I am aware of the imperfection of my memory.  As we age, we gain context and perspective, but we become further distanced from the exactitude of recent memory.  I will try to get it correct, but I am only human.

Some of my memories are very vivid. They are clear and bright. What I am at work here to do is to entertain and historicize. Let me guide your thoughts, while we may, for the abyss of the past unknowable is also the unknowable abyss of our future.

I seek, through rhetoric and logical reason, to explain the experience of my life.  My reason stems from my youthful enthusiasm for geometric proofs. I favor logic and truth over passion and dogma. As a deep sea diver at the end of his tether, I seek the signposts of organic memory, in order to understand my life and to understand the history of our country from 1967 to 2024.

I recall learning to write.  It began with responses to quizzes and essays in English class.  As I have mentioned earlier, so won’t belabor here, two of my short stories were published in English textbooks in high school.  The one on rugby was said to be notable for its style.  

At Duke, I got a D- on an essay on Virginia Woolf’s feminism.  The essay was dismissed as “anachronistic” because it was about a feminism which hadn’t happened yet.  I was allowed to rewrite the paper.  But by my junior and senior years, I was receiving mostly A’s on my term papers and I graduated on the Honor Roll.   

When I began graduate school at Pitt in 1991, I began to study literary theory and philosophy.  l wrote about trying to understand the dialectical process.  

When I left the university in 1998, I continued to self educate and independently read and write. This reading and writing is a self sustaining mental circulation.  The final results are formed from the revisions through which I put my books in the process of writing, re-writing, and re-writing some more.

Book 2

Chapter 1

In 1971, I was transported from SoCal across the country to a new life in Hingham, Massachusetts.  Hingham is part of metropolitan Boston and is steeped in history.  Hingham is on the southern shore of Boston Harbor and had originally been settled by the schismatic English Puritans who dissented from the main line of their church (Wikipedia).  So while the United States was formed by dissenters, they were religious dissenters, caught up in disputes about doctrine, dogma, and religious practice, more than political dissenters.  Thus we have, through our history, a confusion between the religious and the political. 

The right wing, with their constituencies in the reactionary sects of America, advocate the reduction in the scope of government and assert that religion can take up the slack of social care for the dispossessed in America.  I have stayed at the Mission in Denver, Colorado a few times and remain grateful for their food and shelter. We are said to welcome a religious plurality in America, and contain one, yet the right wing sects consider all religions heresy that are not Christian.  

Religious social support isn’t preferred.  “Heresy,” is a bitter term that forbids mutual sympathies.  It is an exclusionary term.  You should not have to adopt a religion to receive social care in America.  In my homeless life, I welcomed the care of the Denver Mission. I read The Old Testament there, in the company of a self proclaimed murderer, and The Holy Bible comforted me.  You meet all kinds of people when you're on the street.  I have never been arrested.

The town of Hingham is about as old as old gets in America.  It was settled in 1633 by Puritan schismatics and bought from the Wampanoag in 1665 (Wikipedia).  In Hingham, I attended Derby Academy.  This private school is the oldest co educational institution in the United States.  

From the very start of my education, I was encouraged to treat my female peers as mental equals and my female teachers as worthy educators. 

I recall that at Derby Academy, for the little ones like me, there was a regular nap time scheduled for every day.  We would all get in a line and retrieve our sleeping mats.  Then we would position them on the floor of the gymnasium where, safe within the confines of our mat, we would peacefully slumber.  To this day, I sometimes nap.  I went to sleep last night before nine and woke up refreshed in the early hours of the morning.  Then, with the first blush of coffee, I began to write. 

While I was in school, I was a night owl. Now, I am more of an early bird and often wake long before the birds begin to chirp just before dawn.

I also recall Derby Academy’s sandbox.  Within its boundaries, I would sculpt landscapes with Tonka trucks like some alien terraformer.  The key things I remember about the sandbox were its boundaries and the mutability of its terrain.

Maybe this is what appeals to me about the much maligned online video game called Fortnite.  Let me explain.  It is said to be a “sandbox” video game in which the open world the players play in has boundaries.  The sandbox of the game’s playing field is the boundaries of a vast island, The topography of the island on which the game is played, contains mountains, hills and valleys.  The island contains all of the seasons of the year in different regions–everything from fall foliage, to verdant summer sunlight, to winter snowy mountains.  

Thus depending on where you start on the island, and you can parachute into any region of the island to start, every game is different.  Fortnite is a game of exploration.  The game–and now Fortnite is four games in one: a Rocket League set of racetracks, an open world in the Lego mode, a one hundred person fight in which players can squad up in  twos, threes, or fours, and a Battle Royale in which the avatar you control must survive a fight to the death with ninety nine other players in the sandbox island game world to become sole survivor.  I have survived as the sole survivor in the Battle Royale mode six times.  I appear, in the game to my opponents, as a golden skeleton encased in black rags holding a scimitar in each hand.  This is my avatar.

I like the game, there are other video games that are far more violent and gory.  When you are slain by another player, in Fortnite, you dissolve into pixels. There is no blood or gore as in some video games not made for the faint of heart.  Horror video games, and they are a very popular genre, are usually too grisly for me. Fortnite doesn’t bother me at all.  It is tactical combat in a virtual world.

As for being the sole survivor, one in one hundred, for one hundred start the game and only one survives alive to the end.  I have won the Fortnite Battle Royale, alone, several times and take pride in my victories, but I wouldn’t last a minute against a professional player. There are professional video game players and they are televised on the internet channel Twitch.  For my experience level in the game of Fortnight, I am not bad.

As for whether or not violence in video games is good or bad, I would reply, we live in a violent world, not predominantly democratic at all, in which we had better understand the use of force.  The military monitors Fortnight.  They like to know who is a virtual soldier: capable of slaying 99 of his peers outfitted like him with a variety of scavenged weapons, bandages, and shields.  These machine guns, shotguns, rocket launchers, etc. are scavenged, for the 100 players who start the Battle Royale all start the video game by parachuting onto the island with no gear at all except, a pick axe to break up objects on the surface of the island to serve as units for building defensive walls.  It is remarkable that during my brief reign in Fortnite, I didn't use the defensive half of the Fortnite game but played aggressively.

Now, I often play Rocket League.  Rocket League is a video game in which, the way I configure the game, three online players form a team to oppose three different online players in a game akin to hockey.  Each player’s avatar in the game is a race car which can boost and jump.  The race cars nudge, pass, and shoot the ball into the opponents goal.  The games only take five minutes unless there is a tie.  Then the next team who scores wins the game.

I play Rocket League because it is fun.  Everyone needs a little fun in their life.  I have scored five times in one game but I prefer to play a complete game and protect my team's goal.  A perfect game for me would not be six goals but one shot, one goal, one assist, and one save.

Chapter 2

Massachusetts’ climate introduced me to a frigid winter for the first time.  I was used to balmy California and wondered if the absence of a professional football team there then was typical of their easy going climate.  The pacific and sociable environment of California had little room for organized violence.  We had baseball, football, basketball, and hockey in Boston and we learned to play tough.

Since this is a memoir, I will relate my only two violent episodes, because I learned something that I want to explain to you.  Violence is never to be celebrated.

I accidentally broke a guy’s leg playing soccer.  At the time I was triumphant.  I was a kid.  But I soon felt bad.  How could I enjoy someone else’s pain?  I toned my soccer down after that and never broke another leg.

My only other violent episode, outside of a couple of childish scuffles and the time I helped put down a bar brawl, happened when I was in high school. I punched an aggressive trespasser with a left uppercut to the jaw and a right jab which broke his nose.  He was coming.  Once again, I knew triumph and regret.  

I wonder if my arthritic left shoulder is my karmic punishment for doing what one should never do—strike first. This is what I have learned and why I describe this incident.  Don't strike first, strike last, is proverbial but I have fortunately lived a life mostly free from violence.

Hingham was the first region in which I made neighborhood friends.  In Hingham, I would assemble with the neighborhood kids on our suburban street to play street hockey.  This was in the days of Bobby Orr. Boston was known for having a strong professional hockey team.  I didn’t watch a lot of sports, at the time, but I did get caught up in Boston’s mania for hockey.

Hockey is known for its speed, power, and fights.  The kids from across the street would assemble and we would play hockey in the street between us.  We never fought.  I don’t think we were too rough, but we did check each other for position and to deny territory.  I took this hockey mode of play to soccer when I played a defensive position later in life.  I was known for aggressive play.  Some said I was too rough, but I always tried to go for the ball and stay within the rules of the game.

In one of my most vivid memories of this time in Boston, we made a visit to a cranberry bog.  Cranberries are native to the region.  A film of cranberry fruit grows on the surface of the bog as the plants seek the light from the sun.  There was a narrow gauge railroad that ran along the raised berms between the bogs of winter fallow cranberry fields.

The boggers put out lighted Christmas figures (Santa, an Angel, the Prince of Peace) in the fields so that the painted plywood forms appeared to float on the surface of the bogs.  I enjoyed the vista of these figures as we trundled along, looking backwards, in the winter open air train.  I was dressed in my bulky cold weather clothing so I was really not too cold at all. 

This experience now reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s emblematization of Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus. Let me describe it to you.  In Klee’s painting, as Benjamin sees it, the angel of history is blown backwards into the future as he watches the horrific carnage of the past accumulate in his wake. For many years, and I am still under the influence of Benjamin, I celebrated this figuration as conforming with my tragic view of history and appropriate with my comfortable melancholy for didn’t that angel represent me?  Hadn’t I come to take pleasure in my melancholy?

Book 3 

Chapter 1

In 1974, we moved to Lima, Ohio.  The factory in Lima was without a union. Cincinnati was the world headquarters of my father’s increasingly multinational corporation.  The goal of the management was to develop the corporation into a non-union workforce.  This was in  accord with the goals of the management, but not necessarily to the advantage of the Lima workers.  The factory succeeded under my father’s management.  Maybe it had something to do with the can-do attitude and blue collar work ethic of the Lima working class. 

My own experience with the unions was different.  I would join a union as a graduate student at Pitt.  This union provided no benefits, but joining up was perhaps indicative of my sympathies.  I identified with the workers in Pittsburgh, for I was poorer than the working class.  This relative poverty was thought to be appropriate because the working class of Pittsburgh had endured frightful working conditions and long hours for their pay.  

As a graduate student, I attended seminars, prepared for class and edited student papers from the freshman English composition class I taught.  While I had intense demands on my attention, it would probably appear as loafing to a Pittsburgh mill worker since my occupation was sedentary, performed while sitting, because it involved reading and writing.  I taught a class two to three times per week, three times a year.

Organized labor was not unusual in Lima.  It developed in Lima until by 1940, there were more than fifty unions within the city limits (Wikipedia.com Encyclopedia).

The Lima of 1974 had already peaked.  The glory days of Lima were in the past.  Lima had been an oil boom town, a regional rail hub, and then a medical site.  First, the Shawnee were forced to leave their land for a reservation in Kansas.  Then, Lima was established as the county seat of the land that the Shawnee had been forced to leave behind (Wikipedia). 

The discovery of natural gas at Lima’s Northern neighbor, Findlay in 1884, and later the discovery of oil near Lima, brought Rockefeller’s Standard Oil.   At one point, Lima’s oil field was the largest oil field in the United States.  In 1893, The World’s Fair was lit by Lima oil which traveled to Chicago from Lima in a pipeline.  By 1886, 250 oil fields were located in the Lima, Ohio region.  All this oil brought the railroads. In 1906, 146 trains passed through Lima every day.  By 1930, eight railroads served booming Lima (Lima, Ohio, Wikipedia).  

Lima became a leader in the production of locomotives.  Lima Locomotive works, known locally as “the Loco,”  produced the Shay Steam Locomotive.  This locomotive was influential in locomotive design.  Thousands were produced.  Later, during WW2, the workers of “the Loco” produced 1,655 Sherman tanks (Wikipedia).

Military tanks have always been a part of Lima’s local economy.  The Lima Army Tank Plant, or Joint Systems Manufacturing Center as it is known in the military, produces and repairs the M1 Abrams battle tank.  During WW2, this factory produced the M5 light tank and the T-26 Pershing tank.  At its peak, The Army Tank Plant employed more than 5,000 workers (Wikipedia).

The early oil and railroad industries were gutted during the Great Depression.  By 1934, industrial employment in Lima had halved.  Lima is now considered a rust belt city, like the cities of my maturity Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.  Durham peaked before my time there too though the Research Triangle Park has gone on to become a major research hub.  Pittsburgh and Durham rebounded with education and medicine. 

Medicine helped to buoy Lima’s economy.  In a bizarre history, The Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane was constructed there.  They poured concrete for the facility from 1908 until 1915.  Until the Pentagon was built, The Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane was the largest poured concrete structure in the United States.  Conditions at this facility were troubled and escape attempts were common. These conditions eased after a class action suit on behalf of the patients implemented improvements to ensure the patient’s “dignity, privacy, and human care.” Despite all this, in 1982, reflecting Reagan’s inhumane treatment of the mentally ill, The Lima State Hospital became a medium security prison.

So there was a sinister side to Lima, with its oil fields, its weapons of war, and its hospital for the criminally insane.  This sinister side developed early with the strong local presence of the KKK.  Its neighbor to the south, Cincinnati, had been publicly abolitionist, but the KKK was strong in Lima, and, as late as August 1923, a KKK parade drew a crowd of 100,000 people.  It was in this environment that an even more sinister and violent organization in the KKK, the Black Legion, flourished.  This local institutional racism in Lima was reflected in a later battle for the desegregation of the city’s only public pool (Wikipedia).

Chapter 2

The neighborhood in the Lima suburbs to which we moved was safe and secure.  There was one way in.  There was one way out.  The neighborhood roadway made a loop, traveling past a lake, up a hill, and then down and around again to the exit from where it had begun.

I had a new bicycle.  It was a device of the times for this was the 70s.  It had a gold flecked banana seat, tassels at the ends of the handle bars, safety reflectors all around, and three gears.  I would ride this bicycle alone around the loop that constituted our neighborhood without much danger from traffic.

Chapter 3

In Lima, I entered public school.  This is where my life-long adventure with reading began.  I read for school.  I began to read for pleasure.  I preferred it to television, to which I was limited to “two half hours a day” by my parents. This limitation did not apply to Saturday morning cartoons.  My sister and I would watch cartoons from the time we woke up in the morning until brunch on Saturday.  I liked Looney Tunes and Underdog.

The hunger that Sylvester felt for Tweety Bird, and the hunger of Wily Coyote for the Road Runner, seemed to motivate these two cartoon characters. Was this a critique of the carnivore a critique of meat eating itself?  We can survive as vegetarians, quite pleasurably and more economically, than as carnivorous predators.  Why do we still slaughter animals for food?   

Wily Coyote seemed to operate in an environment free from want.  Every time he needed something, often explosives, it would arrive from Acme.  Why couldn’t he order take out? 

Underdog, I liked for different reasons.  His simple humble demeanor contrasted with the overpowering force of his amplified abilities.  Somewhere in this part of my life, my sympathy for the less powerful began.  My sympathy for the humble underdog, and the recognition that they too had the power to resist and prevail, stemmed from the Underdog cartoon.

But I still like the Yankees, though they are rarely underdogs.  They showcase top talent in every position.  With their pinstripes, pinstripe suits clothe the executives of New York, they can afford to do so.  Their budget for talent traditionally exceeds that of every other team. 

I also admire those Chicago champions, the Bulls of Jordan, Pippen, Kerr, and Rodman.  Their phenomenal talent and teamwork led to winning ways.  While I root for the underdog, I can be a fair weather fan because I respect talent and the hard-won ability of the outlier who, after taking more than 1,000,000 practice shots, rarely misses.

Chapter 4

It was at this time of my life that I began to be exposed to the media, cartoons and otherwise.  My first mediated desire occurred at this time though I was not yet in puberty.  I mooned over Farrah Fawcett's famous poster—sexy for the time.  I was told no, when I asked for a poster of my own, and early in my life came to associate desire with shame.

I see desire differently now. Buddhism teaches us that desire, everything from lust to greed, causes suffering.  We can eliminate suffering by learning to eliminate desire itself.  Can you imagine what it is like to live without desire, lust, or greed? It seems foreign perhaps, but Buddhism’s Middle Way has much to offer.  Its insights, and its actual practices like transcendental meditation (to which I do not claim to be a devotee), can really help you through a rough patch.

It was during my time in Lima that the original Star Wars was released.  It was the first film that I remember seeing in the theater.  I am told that I saw it five times.  I identified with the young heroes of the resistance Luke, Han, and the princess, as I would later find sympathetic the Fremen of Frank Herbert’s Dune.  I found the later Star Wars films with their exploration of the qualities of evil as represented in Lord Vader, for after all he had destroyed a planet, to be revealing but less stirring than the glorious victory of the resistance over the Empire in the original film.  I think I associated the victory of the Resistance over the Empire with the victory of the democratic colonists’ over their aristocratic king. 

The Bicentennial occurred when I was in Lima and it intruded into my life from the television.  It was a year-long television event that I found overblown but sometimes stirring.  I was a young patriot.  I had been taught patriotism in Massachusetts at the Derby Academy.  We celebrated all the national holidays.  We were taught the history of the young revolutionary colonists in the Boston region.  My favorite holiday became Thanksgiving.  I liked the supposed harmony in this celebration between the Native Americans and the colonists.  

It was not until later in life that I came to learn that the United States had used the Native Americans dishonorably and still do.  I was happy with the revolutionary spirit of our country, but I knew little of dissent.  At this point in my life I was a naïve patriot.

In retrospect, it seems that this uncomplicated year-long Bicentennial media event of 1976 was meant to repair years of horror over what the television confirmed to be our handiwork in Vietnam.  We left Vietnam as the French did.  The Vietnamese were unvanquished.  The US left after killing millions of Vietnamese, for reasons of ideology, with little to show for it.  Just as the French had left Vietnam, we left in defeat pushing helicopters from warships into the sea to make room for more endangered evacuees.  

What was it about these Vietnamese that made them such potent fighters that they could out battle a Western imperial power like France, a superpower like the USA, and soon after that an invasionary force from China!?

The USA  had been divided, and the 1976 Bicentennial seemed to offer a resolution which would only intensify with the return to the sureties of the 1950s celebrated by the Reagan 1980s.  By the time of Reagan, American universalism and US triumphalist rhetoric seemed to drown out dissent on television.

Trends had changed by the 1970s.  The youth still dressed differently, but the utopian ideals of the 60s were left to struggle while the hippies' sexual liberation and drug use were retained.  These inspired 70s rock and roll.  

Above all, the unified self congratulation of the Bicentennial obscured class conflict and cultural war in America.  The southern killers (Dixiecrats?) of Easy Rider had won.  JFK, MLK, RFK, and Malcolm X were assassinated.  The 60s were murdered.

It was the simple patriotism of the Bicentennial, with its insistence that all citizens were unified when we were in fact riven by conflicts, laid the foundation for Reagan’s presidency of 1980.  He associated this naive nationalism with our national economic supremacy at the time.  This is common to some branches of Protestantism in which economic success is associated with divine salvation.  This holier-than-thou dogma leaves little place for poor people and they suffered under Reagan’s administration.

Reagan unleashed the bulls, lowered the top tax bracket, deregulated the economy, and emptied the asylums into the streets.  The rich spent their new found wealth on luxury goods, while the poor did not benefit in the 80s as the new money failed to trickle down beyond the luxury industries.  The poor were driven to two income families and credit to support their households.  To add insult to injury, good working class jobs that provided a middle class lifestyle for those with a high school education, were systematically eliminated from the cities of America and shipped overseas.  Reaganism impoverished the working middle class in America.

Hollywood played along with Reagan, who after all was a Hollywood production, a hero of the Californian right wing reaction, if once head of the Screen Actors Guild.

In the eighties, our movie heroes became the police.  They also became the corporate traders, whose ability to amass fortunes through the keystroke distribution of national and international wealth, became the fascinations of Hollywood and were celebrated.

Robocop was released in 1987.  In it, the robotically repaired cyborg police officer, with a cop’s precise aim, survived his human foes as they escalated their attacks against him.  He also outwitted the superior robot at the end of the film in the boss match style of a video game.  Robocop later became a video game. 

The uncomfortable android sought to survive both as a machine, but also as a human being.  From the start, the human character of the cyborg is foregrounded.  He has a human past, terrible injuries, and a complicated life as a nonsexual being with no reproductive organs.  His mood is melancholy and stern. 

So the countercultural heroes of the 60s became the police of the eighties.  The drug war was characterized as a decided issue when it had always been disputed on the college campuses and in the cites.  The new anti-drug warriors were portrayed as heroic, and drug users were predominately portrayed as uncomplicated villains as in Miami Vice.  Cocaine was publicly condemned, but privately hoovered by celebrities, talking heads, and those in the corridors of power.

In my experience, cocaine is ruinous.  It can be ruinous financially for those who it ensnares in its web of addiction. It also ruins the attitude. I was introduced to cocaine in graduate school, and sometimes used it on the weekends. I found cocaine nasty. Its use led to vain prattle and a nasty strung-out comedown. They say cocaine can be of use medicinally, but I’d rather have a triple espresso than a gram of cocaine any day.

I am a coffee and cigarettes writer. I am old fashioned. I sit here in my reading nook, flanked by the bookshelf wings of my library, and read and write.  I am cradled in a comfortable recliner.  I drink coffee in the morning while I write. During cigarette breaks in a comfortable chair in the garage, I think of new directions for my writing.

It took the film Wall Street, released in December, 1987, to historicize the 80s to itself.  The villain, not the hero, here was a corporate raider, hell bent on cash extraction, who declared “Greed is good.” 

While the rah-rah television media of the 1980s was formed by the Bicentennial celebration of 1976, cracks in the television’s overlay of triumphalism and universalism existed.  These cracks surfaced in the liberal activism that continued from the anti-war protests of the 60s.  The liberals of the eighties fought Reagan every step of the way.  But in the seventies, the war on Vietnam and its neighbors was over and the unpopular draft that affected so many young men of the sixties had been canceled.  The country was in a mood to celebrate and the television industry was only too happy to join in the jubilee of 1976.  

Chapter 5

My mother was seriously ill when we were in Lima.  She suffered from migraines.  She was sometimes bed ridden.  It was in this situation that I became fiercely protective of my mother and stressed.  Two times, someone called on the phone.  I took the call and they hung up.  When I took a third call, I had some rude words for the caller.  It was my father. When he got home, he gave me a spanking.  This was the only time he punished me violently, but I never forgot it.  It changed our relationship.  Corporal punishment is popular in Ohio, it is said.  I oppose it.  It ruins a relationship for violence can never be forgotten or forgiven.

Chapter 6

It was in Lima, Ohio that I made my first friend.  We were in Indian Guides together.  We made friends while piloting a canoe.  He was my first peer, we were in the same grade at school and, while I remember only a little about him, I recall that I put him off by playing a sad song repeatedly on a record player. 

From the start, my conception of friendship was one of the identity of friendship and loss.  Maybe that is why I played that sad song for him.  I had physically moved before I had made close friends.  I had learned to live without friendship, but I was going to miss my young friend.  My family was soon to leave Lima, Ohio to return to the community of Rossmoor in Orange County, California where we would remain for only eight months.

Book 4

Chapter 1

It was in 1977 that we returned to a new home in Rossmoor, Orange County, California.  I enrolled in the school across the street from our house and attended it until my discomfort there led me to refuse to go to school for a few days.  I was hassled at recess and made no close friends.

While I would skateboard with neighborhood acquaintances, I made no real connections and had grown detached, interior, introverted, and withdrawn.  I began to read extensively.  I read Uris and Michener. 

I remember being shocked by the deployment of a buckskin condom in The Thorn Birds.  It seemed to me that the goal of intercourse should be mutual sexual pleasure and that this buckskin condom must have been very uncomfortable for the woman and probably no great shakes for the man.  

So at a young age, I began to read long, complicated, adult books.  In the absence of friendship, my mental life became engaged with the authors of the books I read and I learned little of the social graces.  I was a pair of eyeballs that existed to read texts.  From these texts, I derived a host of imaginary friends and foes.

During this time, I wore puka beads and a hang ten necklace shaped like a footprint around my neck. It was in Rossmoor for the second time, that I found a character of sympathy in the protagonist of science fiction’s Time Enough For Love by Robert Heinlein. This character is cursed to live forever.  His friends and family die around him as his lifespan lengthens to include many epochs. 

I identified with this space man because each of the places in which I had lived seemed to encompass a different lifetime.  I had so many places, so many lifetimes, each populated by different people, and all characterized by the acquisition of knowledge that one had better remember and new friends it was best to forget.

I remember the severity of that California winter during this eight month period when we were in California.  We didn’t use the heat in our bungalow.  We were within the marine layer of the Pacific ocean.  Instead, that winter I would awaken, cold and shivering, and approach the space heater mounted on the wall.  Once it got warmed up, I would turn slowly, as if on a spit and bask in the space heater’s red filament heat in the chilly empty space of the room.  I recall the cold of California more than the warmth.

Chapter 2

It was at this point of my life that I began to go through the early stages of adolescent male puberty.  I was made uncomfortable by the symptoms of puberty.  My symptoms were termed “bed wetting” and never explained.  I became ashamed of my bed wetting.  I didn't really feel lust at this stage in my life.  I had no girlfriends or any friends at all.

It was in Rossmoor that I began to listen to popular radio from the clock radio that awakened me every weekday morning for school.  The anthems of an older generation were being sung on the radio.  Styx, Kiss and Queen got airplay.  

Kiss scared me.  Their costumes and makeup seemed threatening, but now I see how self conscious and deliberate they were in manipulating their image and fame.  They were older than me, on their platform shoes bigger than me, for I was not yet fully grown.  When I heard Kiss was known to circulate a pail among their fans during concerts to collect saliva, which the band would later drink on stage, I was disgusted.  I see this now as a celebration of the French kiss, with tongue, and the who-gives-a-damn-anyway exchange of saliva.  In the era of safe sex, we are expected to kiss through masks, use dental dams, or not kiss at all.  Kissing is not very hygienic.  But I am describing the 1970s and the 1970s were sloppy.

At the time, I didn't like the band Queen.  Their “We Will Rock You,” then very popular, sounded like a celebration of bullying to me.  I felt like I was being bullied.  I considered myself an outsider, from out of town, and not long for this place.  I eventually stopped looking for permanence (or attachment as the Buddhists’ say) in relationships and became very present oriented.  I didn’t expect friendships to last and perhaps valued them less than most.  Now, I see this “We Will Rock You” as a celebration of resistance, for wasn’t Queen’s frontman a gay minority, something I didn't know at the time, and was’t the song a celebration of a minority's power to overcome?

On the radio, the Styx song “Come Sail Away" had become my favorite tune.  I was sailing and reading science fiction so the tune’s identification of sailing with space travel I found stimulating.  

I also read Dove, at this time.  This book about a teenager sailing around the world, circumnavigating the planet in a small sailboat, stimulated my fantasies for a long time.  I have since wanted to circumnavigate the globe, by trawler or by sail, but the world is at war and who can really afford to circumnavigate anyway.  Still, the young Californian teenager of Dove did it modestly, but not without peril, which is why Dove is such an inspiring yarn.  It is a coming of age story.  He suffered and struggled alone with the weather, the sea, and himself. 

At this time, I was taking sailing lessons in a tiny, single mainsail, sabot sailing dinghy with a detachable sideboard.  This new hobby delighted me.  I felt real freedom when I was sailing the sabot alone in the calm harbor and what has my life been about but the search for freedom.  Freedom to read.  Freedom to think.  Freedom to write.  

Out there on the water in the glistening afternoons, I felt in my element, comfortable utilizing the wind, in total control of my simple craft, and alone.

Book 5

Chapter 1

In 1979, my family moved to the Cincinnati, Ohio suburb of Indian Hill.  The Village of Indian Hill was affluent and densely wooded. The prevailing fashion was preppy.  During much of this period of my life, Reagan was in office.  The Preppy Handbook was released during this time and its snarky commentary on the preppy style seemed typical of my insulated little world. 

I didn’t pay attention to the news during this part of my life (and still rarely do) and it wasn’t until a required senior year political science class that I began to inquire into my own political sensibilities. I had real sympathies brought about by my appreciation of music.  While I had no work experience yet, music helped me to understand myself.  Rock and roll of the 60s youth movement made me countercultural and anti establishment.

In 1980, the mood in the country was jubilant because Reagan’s adroit alliance with the television and the movie media had produced a celebration, in some circles, of a religiously blessed economic success.  The middle class was under assault, but you had to look hard to perceive disunion.  Even Hugh Heffner got married in the eighties.  The decade was full of nostalgia for the 1950s.

This identification of economic success with God’s approval has long been present in American thought and practice.  While liberal Catholics are suspicious of capitalism, and see its effects as largely pernicious and detrimental to the poor, the right wing religious sects liked Reagan’s public piety.  Reagan’s television popularity seemed to mute dissent.

We moved from our modest Californian bungalow to five acres on a woodsy and hilly lot. There was no one in my grade on the street so I went to high school without neighborhood friends.  I concentrated on my studies for school and on my independent reading for curiosity, pleasure, and self-improvement.

Was it in high school or was it in college that I began to read Jack Kerouac?  The Beats, the avant-garde of the American 1950s, were what I celebrated about the 1950s.  They were related to my search for the meaning of the 60s, as they inspired the hippies and were a partial namesake for the band The Beatles.  Beat qualities were “the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation, and exploration (Wikipedia, Beat Generation),”

I read On the Road (1957), and then Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels.  I read the first volume of Kerouac’s correspondence.  I read Gerald Nicosia’s Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac, Memory Babe.  I read William Burrogh’s Naked Lunch (1959).  I read a little of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956).  I was fundamentally influenced by the Beats, most personally by Kerouac, just as the hippies of the 60s obviously were because couldn't the Wikipedia quote above also describe some of the qualities of the hippies.

Kerouac’s peripatetic lifestyle appealed to me in my youth.  The significance of Buddhism to him inspired me so when I left the university.  Buddha, like Christ, was a wandering charismatic   I began a peripatetic lifestyle armed only with the contents of my made in the USA, external frame, Jansport, former scout backpack and a series of bus tickets to big cities. 

I stayed in hostels during these travels, mostly American Youth Hostels (AYH), and visited Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Portland, LA, Seattle, and Vancouver.  I was just a tourist.  I was a pair of roving eyeballs and shy to a fault.  

Hostels are different from hotels.  Hostels have bunk rooms for sleeping, a shared kitchen for all guests to use, a common room, and sometimes a bar or library.

I met few people and made no connections during my travels.  I envied Kerouac for his friendships.  I located Kerouac in the tradition of Whitman and Thoreau and liked both his ceaseless spiritual quest and his civil disobedience.

While he oscillated between New York, Denver, and San Francisco, the centers for the avant-garde of his time, I never matched up with my times avant-garde.  Grunge Seattle and Wicker Park alternative Chicago occurred during my youth but I was an outsider to both countercultures. While I did own Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness, the Smashing Pumpkins’ double CD, and it did appeal to my Dureresque melancholia, I did not experience grunge until later when I traded some CDs for a four CD collection from Nirvana.

In graduate school, I mostly listened to classical music. I would check out CDs from the library and record them onto audio tape. I liked Transfigured Night, the Eroica, and Beethoven’s ninth (but without all that damn singing, I thought at the time).

Chapter 2

It was when we moved to Indian Hill that my mother read Tolkien’s The Hobbit and the first two books of the subsequent trilogy to my sister and I.  These adventure stories captured my imagination and I would go on to read the third book of the trilogy in short order. 

This reading out loud was my first experience of listening to a mature text read aloud.  It took us a few months to get through it all.  Listening to a text read aloud, newly as available as an application on your cell phone, put me on to the cadence and musicality of good prose.

I read many Hemingway novels from the library in middle school.   These novels’ investigations of masculinity became constitutive. Alhough I would develop an androgynous creative intelligence, my masculine personality was stereotypical, Hemingwayesque, and even a little cowboy at this point in my life.  I became free wheeling and confident because I was doing well in school. I was also a scout and I liked camping and sitting around a campfire like Nick Adams. 

I see why people have the fire pits of postmodernity now.  They can still gather as a small community, even in the city, around these small contained fires, as humans have gathered around a hearth for light, protection, and warmth at night for millenia.

I liked camping. It is a return to the primitive.  Simple tasks (setting up camp, starting and maintaining a fire, preparing a nutritious meal), achieve, through mindfulness and simplicity, the economy of a Zen koan.

It was when I was still in middle school that I got my first job. I found work at WaldenBooks.  I ran the cash register and sometimes shelved books at this small store full of books in the original Kenwood mall. 

The cash register was simple to operate.  I operated it like I might have played a video game.  The cash register’s only concrete variable was the roll of paper that had to be swapped out periodically.  At the end of the shift, the manager and I would match up the sales from the spools of paper with the information in the cash register’s computer. 

The job at WaldenBooks was a good introduction to clerical labor.  It rewarded exactitude in calculation and alphabetical shelving.  I learned some valuable skills in my first job that I would use in building my own library.  I was a consumer of books from a young age.  The books in my personal research library of approximately 650 books serve as guideposts for this text, along with Wikipedia and other sources of knowledge like the Oxford English Dictionary.

Chapter 3

It was during middle school that I received a stereo for Christmas.  I believe it was from Sears for we commonly got inspiration for our Christmas gifts from the Sears Roebuck catalog.  This phone book sized text seemed even then to persist from a different age.  You could purchase a washing machine from the Sears Roebuck catalog.  At one time, you could buy a Sears Roebuck house. My parents and grandparents were generous with us kids on Christmas.

Much to-do was made about Christmas at my parent’s Methodist church, at the all you could eat buffet feasts at the country club, and at a gathering together of the family.  My grandparents from rural Nebraska usually visited us for Christmas.  We played card games together, particularly Pitch.  Sometimes we played Rummy Cube.

The religion of Christmas left me cold.  While I did confirm with the Methodist church as a teenager, when I thought seriously about the matter of religion, I didn’t see much value in it for me.  I tried to pull out of confirmation, but ended up confirming anyway.  I am uncomfortable in most communities.  It was not until I read the Bible in the hospital later in life that Christianity became a comfort to me. 

My confirmation class had to memorize Corinthians, and since then I have always regarded with suspicion the notion of Christian love.  Why should we turn the other cheek?  Why should love be self-abnegation?  Why should we flagellate ourselves with guilt too strict ideas about sin?  I was raised in the Methodist church and attended one until my senior year, I didn't attend church when I was at Duke with its cathedral, divinity school, organ, and carillon.

We were required to take two classes about religion at Duke, so I, early in my education, took a class on comparative religion and a class on the African American religious experience.  

The comparative religion classes' final project was to write a conversation (dialog) between three people of different faiths.  I selected Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist characters.  From the very beginning, my education encouraged a relativistic approach to religion.  Take whatever you find of value from all the world religions and leave the narrow minded dogma of any fixed religion behind.

“The Black Experience in Religion,” taught by C. Eric Lincoln, was a class about preaching style and congregational participation but it was also a class about the link between black religion and the civil rights’ protest movement.

I did find some value in the Bible when I later began to read the Old Testament. I was suffering and reading the Old Testament lightened my load.  I identified with David, who spoke with God, because I heard voices in my head too.  I paused, in my reading of the Old Testament, after God’s punishment of his tribes in the Jeremiah.  In the Old Testament book of Ezekiel, God admits that his methods are not always good. Are they always just? Was it for the New Testament to harness the good to God’s justice in the name of love?

I hesitate, even today, to call myself a Christian.  I have read most of The Bible now, the Old Testament through Jeremiah, and the New Testament to Revelations.  My relationship with religion is intellectual and text based.  It is serious and heartfelt.  It is personal and does not desire or require the univocality, or “groupthink,” of any religious community. 

While I was raised a Christian, I have found Buddhism, which recognizes no deity, most useful of all of the world religions precisely because it is not theistic—it does not share in what has been called the “God delusion.”

Buddhism is about an inspirational human being who was born in India. Buddha was a finite man without a God.  He rejected the sheltered life of a prince.  He sought to understand suffering—at one point suffering ascetically under a tree without nourishment until he recognized the middle way.  Buddha attained enlightenment.  He died a mortal man only to be transformed into an eternal spirit. His example can be followed and his teachings and techniques about how to lighten suffering can be learned and taught.

Buddhism sees human suffering as the fundamental quality of existence and provides practical techniques for overcoming suffering. I  am especially curious about Buddhism. I am spiritual. I, like a social anthropologist who sees the religions of the epochs as manifestations of particular societies in world history, want to learn more about all the world’s religions on principle for I like to explore the differences that make us unique.  I don’t have one religion; I have many.  I don't have too little religion, I have too much.

In the Old Testament, I liked the character of David, as I enjoy all the warrior-poets in world literature.  There was Don Quixote, the central character in the world’s first self-reflexive novel, that errant knight whose character was influenced intertextually by the romances of chivalry.  There was the prince of Machiavelli, in which David’s direct relationship with God was replaced by a secular articulation of political expediency and the strategies and tactics of secular rule.  There was Shakespeare’s Prince Henry IV, Hal, whose bluff naïveté is spoofed by the world weary and corrosive perspective of Falstaff–as Don Quixote is knowingly mocked, in the most entertaining passages of the newly self conscious novel form, by his clever, laughing squire.  There was the celebration of the interiority of Hamlet. Hamlet appealed to my melancholy.

I began to develop a small vinyl collection in junior high.  It was in junior high school and I listened to The Beatles.  I listened sequentially to their music from their early major albums to their later major albums.  I experienced the band in adolescence, when many experienced the band in the 1960s.  My favorite album of theirs was The White Album of 1968. I perceived them to be emblematic of the 60s counterculture (they formed in 1960 and broke up in 1970) whose music appealed to me particularly because I listened to that music in my youth. 

I was aware of the lengthening of their hair and beards from album cover to album cover, the change in their fashion and clothes, and the development in their musical style from its early harmonic style, through the acid turn, and on to psychedelia.

I never tried LSD, and fear that it might disturb the sensitive balance of my brain.  LSD fans say this interruption is therapeutic.  I did my share of magic mushrooms in Amsterdam, but the 60s acid turn I will have to experience only in the album covers and in the musical expressions of the 60s bands who explored the LSD acid trip.

LSD was at first investigated for its military uses and then for its psychological benefits.  The hippies celebrated pot and LSD, but rejected amphetamines and heroin.  The hippies also were interested in psychedelic magic mushrooms.  The psilocybin containing mushrooms of the hippies of the 60s, and of spiritual groups since the dawn of time, were celebrated as opening the eyes of perception.  Hadn’t Shiva brought marijuana to her devotees and weren’t magic mushrooms added to the communally consumed soup, or “soma,” during the spiritual rituals of Indian antiquity? 

These mushrooms are presently being researched in psychiatric circles where psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms, is undergoing tests to see to what degree a heroic dose may be beneficial for some patients to break them out of the death spiral of depression.

While I listened to The Beatles in middle school, in high school I liked Pink Floyd and 1980s radio rock.  Pink Floyd’s sonic explorations of psychedelia, I found challenging and their album The Wall personally relevant.  The anti-intellectualism of “We Don’t Need No Education,” impressed me for I was dissatisfied with school although fascinated by the intellectual method I was learning, particularly in my favorite subject geometry. I was also especially intrigued by the new ideas I was reading about in English literature classes. 

Thus began a struggle within me between anti-intellectualism, intellectualism, and finally a post intellectualism.  This latter was characterized by the suspicion of hermeneutical knowledge and intellectual method in general, and the questioning of the utopian and the dialectical project itself. 

Hadn’t Hitler and Stalin been utopians.  They represented themselves as utopian and as expressions of “the good.”  What had utopianism brought us to in the end?  At the extreme pole of the right wing, there is a Naziism.  At the extreme pole of the left wing, there was Stalin, with his police state.  It took Hannah Arendt to articulate the way in which these two poles curled back upon themselves, through the commonality of dictatorship, to become identical in their authoritarian strategies of violently coercive domination and state media propaganda.  Aren't called this authoritarianism totalitarianism.  I became suspicious of humanism and any project which declared itself “good,” for “the good” was often used to justify tyranny.

I listened to Bruce Springsteen in high school.  I liked his heart and the relevance of his themes to my privileged, but rust belt, reality.  Later, I located him somewhere within the progressive tradition of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.  They all sang about the dignity of work and they all had sympathy for the poor.  I experienced Bruce Springsteen organically, he spoke to the industrial wasteland of my rust belt reality, the “darkness on the edge of town,” outside of the privileged sylvan neighborhood of Indian Hill.

After learning about his use of artifice, in his Broadway show, I found he was very self conscious of his role.  After all, he hailed as much from CBGBs, that center of punk and meta-rock in the East Village, as from the Washington Square of the early folkies.  He was a punk and a folkie.  

His deflection of Reagan’s attempt to appropriate Born in the USA for the theme song of Reagan’s presidential election, I thought deft.

How many times have the right wing tried to distort my message of free intellectual curiosity? The right wing, and some who claim to be liberal for the cameras, are committed to a culture war. Book theft is common and is often done at the point of a gun.  They’ve been burning books since before Hitler. 

I have been anti-Nazi since I perceived the suffering of the Jewish people in a photograph of emaciated Jewish people stacked like cordwood near a mass grave. They had been worked to death. They had worked without food until they dropped dead. They had been ripped off and turned into slaves.  I still feel anger and outrage about the Holocaust.  What is left, after such an atrocity exhibit, but horror and despair.

Chapter 4

I gained the nickname “moose” because of my tendency to charge as a defender in soccer, because I was larger than most, because of my strange Bullwinkle accent, and because I sometimes used moose in my big eighties hair. 

I had turned sixteen and my first car was a used Datsun 280Z.  I raced around in this fun coupe.

Despite my lack of finesse, I was made junior varsity soccer team captain as a junior.  I had gained this position by refusing to lose.  At the end of two-a-day practices, in the hot and humid late summer, the entire team would run around all of the fields in the athletic park for a long distance run.  I won, on our first run around the field park, and would refuse to lose that race for the entirety of our two-a-day practice sessions, although I was challenged. 

As a junior, I was rewarded with a promotion to captain of the junior varsity team.  This was a backhanded compliment.  I had several peers on the team, and we had fun because we got all the playing time we wanted, but it was not until our senior year that we would rejoin our upper classmates on the varsity soccer squad.

I was active with track and field in the spring.  Though our team was coed, it was divided into squads by gender.  I liked the shot-put and discus. I ran the 100 yard sprint and the 400 dash.  

My sister, one grade-year back from me, was on the team and I had some female friends, but I didn’t really date much in high school.  There was just the gendered jocularity of the track and the intellectual and gender-blind sparring of the classroom discussion during schoo classes.  I took my female classmates seriously, as I had been taught at Derby Academy, and tried to engage them in classroom debate.  

I had friends from sports.  I had friends from the AP classes I was taking.  My male friends were primarily from sports; my friends from my AP classes were both male and female, but significantly female.

Chapter 5

In middle school, I was active in the chorus.  In high school, I became interested in musical theater.  In high school, we had a yearly musical production that was called Pow Wow.  I had a bit part in the musical Sugar, from which the movie Some Like it Hot was derived, as a freshman.  In my sophomore year, I danced the Charleston in The Boyfriend. As a junior, I played Frank in Merrily We Roll Along.  This was my most complex role.  My senior year, I played Bud Frump in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

In high school, I was active in a song and dance group called The Premiers.  This group was fun, and we performed in tuxedos and gowns for the school, around the city, and in our travels took trips to perform further in the midwest, north to Ontario, and on to the east coast as far away as New York City.

In my junior year, the high school organized a talent show. I performed Jim Morrison’s “Light my Fire” together with a rock music band. I recall, I ate an apple during a long musical interlude, and threw the core into the crowd.

I worked during the summers when I was in high school.  I rehabbed and painted apartment interiors. The profit from the sale of one of these apartment buildings payed for my entire tuition at Duke, I was told.  I also worked as a lifeguard for two summers in a row.  I only had to jump in once to save a struggling kid, but it made the whole experience worthwhile.

I wrecked the 280Z and it was replaced with a used Jeep CJ-7 after awhile.  I guess the idea was that if I drove off road, I could drive back on.  When I graduated, I was rewarded with a GTI.  I drove this throughout my time at Duke and for most of my time in graduate school.  I actually owned this car.  My father signed over the title to me for $1.00.  This was the only time I owned a car.  All my other vehicles, though I alone drove them, were owned by either my Dad or my Mom.

Chapter 6

In high school, we read Orwell’s 1984 in 1984.  This dystopian near future, in which the televisions contain surveillance cameras, was full of both the uniformity and the rebellion demanded of the human spirit by constant surveillance.  1984 influenced my perception of the world and I began to see the intrusions of politics into my life as suspicious and unwelcome.  While I would warm up to television politics and political activism at Duke, in high school I knew little of the world.

Indian Hill was like Tolkien’s shire.  While I liked an adventure, particularly with Scouts, I was most comfortable reading and studying in the comfort and security of the home.  It was not until I began to read The New York Times as a junior in college that I became aware of the details of political conflicts in America and abroad.   High school, the early 1980s, was characterized by a bland American enthusiasm.

Later in my life, I came to see myself as caught up in what Room 101 might contain.  For to me it contained torture and reeducation.  In retrospect, I was educated just fine, and knew enough about the world, and my position in it, to reject the party of the residual, the reactionary, the retrograde, the white nationalists, the KKK, and the American Nazi Party.  I was suspicious of the Democratic Party too, but preferred their constituencies to those of the Republican party.  The Democrat’s enemy is ultimately the genocidal slave-based Naziism of the far right wing and I am a resolute, seasoned anti-fascist by education and experience.  I align with the spirit of liberation as an obligation of privilege and dislike coercive domination.

I was politically radicalized as early as grade school when I saw photographs of Jewish emaciated corpses piled like cord wood next to a mass grave.  These piles of emaciated Jewish bodies had been found next to a bulldozed grave near a concentration camp in which Jewish people and the liberals who dared to stay in Nazi Germany, were murdered through industrial means. 

The more I read The New York Times, the more dissatisfied I became with the limitations to the political spectrum in America affected by twin-party rule.  In Durham, I would read the independent free weekly, with its coverage of local politics and local culture. I found this free liberal weekly to be as appealing, in its own way, as The New York Times. Together, they complemented one another while I was in Durham, NC at Duke.

I worked some when I was in high school and early on identified with labor.  The time I spent framing a luxury house may have made this identification more clear.  I’m not saying the construction workers considered me one of them, I was just moonlighting in their profession, but I knew even then that the luxury house I was building would be too expensive for me. The guys I worked with didn’t seem bothered by this. I respected the handiwork and endurance of the more experienced working men.  

I made the decision at Duke not to pursue material gain, but to pursue education and knowledge.  I had originally thought that I might be a doctor.  As late as my senior year, I thought I might go to school in environmental law.  

By the time I left Durham, I wanted to be a contributing member of the intelligentsia.  The best position for that was in the modest but fulfilling careers provided by the university.

Chapter 7

Before I decided to continue my education in public high school, I took the entrance exam for admittance to Cincinnati Country Day School (CCDS).  CCDS was a private college preparatory school in the neighborhood, and was, in fact, closer in location to my family's house than the public high school I would later attend.  I passed the entry exam at CCDS and struggled over the choice between a private or a public high school education.  

I decided to go to the public high school.  Most of my friends in the neighborhood were from sports, and they were going to the public high school.  I took many AP courses while I was in high school and, because AP classes were weighed a little differently than regular high school classes (they were considered equivalent to college coursework), I ended my high school career with a very high grade point average.

After high school, I always wondered what might have been if I had gone to the private school of CCDS.  Would I have learned more?  In later life, I have come to depend more on scholarship than on friendship for sustenance and support.  I have felt my lack of a formal education at various points in my intellectual career.  I consider my education incomplete and am still reading some of the classics.  I envy those who have experienced a formal classical education.  The Jesuits are said to be thorough in this respect.

When I got to graduate school, I felt my lack of education acutely.  I had read widely, but with little direction, as a child.  I had spent half my career at Duke studying science.  While this has made me a polymath of sorts, I began reading philosophy and critical theory late, and it took some time to understand and place each new text in my growing field of theoretical and historical knowledge.

When I graduated from high school, I was faced with the choice of going to Duke or to Miami of Ohio (where I was offered a full scholarship). I decided to go to Duke.  I  wanted to explore a new region of the country.  I hoped to receive a first rate education at an elite private school.

Book 6

Chapter 1

In the fall of 1986, in a scene straight from DeLillo’s White Noise, I was transported to the Duke east campus coed dormitory of Gilbert Adams. The freshmen were housed on the red brick east campus.  The sophomores and upperclassmen usually lived on west campus in what is a wonderland of gothic architecture.

In 1986, my freshman year, I listened to REM’s Life’s Rich Pageant. Also that year, Bruce Springsteen delivered a multi-CD bundle of his music performed live with the East Street Band.  REM stirred me, and when Michael Stipe, later condemned the “fire on the hemisphere below,” in the CD from 1987, Document, I knew enough to know that REM’s frontman was singing about Nicaragua or the other Latin American countries the US sought to control by gun boat diplomacy, subversion, and proxy war.  

I had seen the film Romero and sympathized with the liberal Catholic proponents of liberation theology.  Later, Stipe seemed to articulate opposition to a time that was full of doctrinaire Reaganism, “tournaments of lies” about our foreign policies, and the need for revolt against “a government for hire in a combat site.” He sang in Document, “It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.”

This tune suggested to me both the fullness of America, it was replete with revolutionaries like Lenny Bruce, but it was also full of authoritarian “landed gentry.” The Reagan television media’s “tournament of lies” expressed national economic self interest as synonymous with a militarized foreign policy.  Ideals were left on the floor—the US sought allies among the dictators of the world—severely compromising the nation’s image worldwide. 

Television was not completely univalent about Reagan, but he was known as the “teflon” president because of the way he shed controversy.  Television’s investigative journalism exposed Iran-Contra and seriously qualified Reagan’s legacy.

Bruce Springsteen Live was released my freshman year at Duke.  The performances it contained seemed to be the greatest hits of the songs I liked in high school.  I didn't follow the boss much after that.  Whenever I felt in a Springsteen frame of mind, which to me became nostalgic, I would simply slot the live CDs and enjoy a different time.  He continued to write and perform good music.  I responded favorably to “Tunnel of Love,” which got radio airplay, and the tune he performed to complicate and heroicize the antihero Mickey Rourke character in "The Wrestler.” The tune’s lyrics included, “Have you ever seen a one-armed man punching at nothing but the breeze? If you've ever seen a one-armed man then you've seen me.”

I sometimes felt like a scarecrow in my oppositionality.  Duke was a home in which I could not stay. I moved off campus my junior year. But at Duke, I was amongst my peers. While in schoosl prior to Duke, I had often felt like a smart person in the classroom.  At Duke, I was just normal. Everyone was smart. There were classmates smarter than me. There were classmates that put more time into their studies. 

When I began to focus on English literature in my Junior year, I began to feel in my element. In my writing, I gained some confidence, and began tilting at windmills.

I didn’t date anyone my Freshman year and I developed few friendships. I was overwhelmed by my studies, mostly science and mathematics, and acutely aware of how immature I was socially.  I was a bookworm and I had succeeded in high school by doing my homework.  I had a good memory, and keeping abreast of the daily homework had been enough for me to excel.  

At Duke, I did the work, but it was not until I began to study literature, which I took to like a fish to water, that I began to excel.  Women were still a mystery to me. I had never learned to juggle more than one at a time.

Chapter 2

In the second semester of my freshman year, I participated in the beery fraternity rush.  I decided to pledge, and in my sophomore year moved into a fraternity house in a quadrangle one entered and left through a groin vault.  My pledge class and I were hazed, and the fraternity chapter was suspended as a result.  I lived in the fraternity house the entirety of my sophomore year with the upper class men who had hazed me. I felt uncomfortable and left the fraternity my junior year and moved off campus.

My sophomore year in the fraternity, I usually chilled with a group of my pledge class who had a room on my floor.  It was with self recognition that I later saw Oliver Stone’s Platoon and identified our little band of warriors influenced by the Willem Dafoe character.  I came to see Platoon as emblematic of the fate of the sixties when sergeant Elias was betrayed and murdered by staff sergeant Bob Barnes, just as the heroes of Easy Rider were murdered by the forces of ignorance, resentment, envy, and reaction. 

At Duke, we listened to Pink Floyd, of which I was  familiar, and Bob Marley.  I had Babylon by Bus in my personal CD collection, but we listened to more of his music in our little group within a group. I listened to “Redemption Song” for the first time in this group. I liked “Kinky Reggae '' which went something like this, “She had brown sugar (had brown sugar).  All over her booga-wooga (over her booga-wooga).  I think I might join the fun (think I might join the fun).  But I had to hit and run (had to hit and run).  See, I just can't settle down (just can't settle down).  In a kinky part of town.  Ride on.  Don't you know I've got to ride on.”

Bob Marley introduced me to an expansive sense of eroticism, already prefigured by my appreciation of The Beatles, amplified by my love of libidinous rock and roll, my limited sexual history, my reading of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (who amused me), and some Sade (who made me uncomfortable).

In the Bob Marley song “Misty Morning,” I recognized myself for I was a youthful student of the humanities in which I included spirituality, literature, and philosophy. I was reading beyond my assigned work. I recall reading Hesse’s Siddhartha, which was very helpful to my spiritual life, and The Tao of Pooh, at this time. “Misty Morning'' went something like this, “The power of philosophy, yeah, floats through my head. Light like a feather, heavy as lead.”

It was this year that I went to see REM in concert at Cameron Indoor Stadium.  This was a more significant event than the one basketball game I would see during my time at Duke.  I perceived REM, though they were a little older than me, as an organic manifestation of the times.  Much of their artistically wrought opposition to Reaganism, popular on campus at the time, represented my own point of view.  

I had received a “miracle” ticket from a fraternity brother. The ticket was free provided I worked security. This security job placed me in the center front of the audience where, for nearly the entirety of the concert, I was the closest fan to REM’s frontman in the entire building. I placed myself directly in front of his microphone stand on the center front edge of the stage.  Cameron Indoor Stadium was full.  While the concert lasted, I felt the warm embrace of an alternative community.

The first concert I attended was Prince’s Purple Rain concert in Cincinnati.  I had seen the movie and had listened repeatedly to the Purple Rain cassette.  The concert was great fun and included an ejaculating guitar, as in the movie, at the climax of the performance.

I saw a Bruce Springsteen concert in Cincinnati.  This was an over the top production with the East Street Band.  I recall we rushed the floor and lost ourselves in the crowd.

I saw Blues Traveler In concert in the East Campus coffeehouse.  This was a concert in an intimate setting from a band of my peers.  One of my roommates had known them before they became famous when they all resided in Princeton, NJ.

I saw Phish in concert at Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill.  This was a jam band that excelled at complexity and improvisation.

I saw a Billy Bragg concert in a Chapel Hill lecture hall.  This concert was moving because I found his music very sympathetic and stirring.

In Cincinnati I saw many concerts at Bogart’s and Sudsy Malone's on Short Vine.  Bogart’s was notable for its variety; Sudsy Malone’s was notable for its mosh pit (and professional laundromat).

I saw Over the Rhine concerts at Kaldi’s and at Washington Park.  These seasoned veterans always put on a soulful show.

I saw Rusted Root in concert in Pittsburgh.  This band, that originated on Pittsburgh's South Side, rocked Oakland in a hot smoke filled club on a cold winter’s night.

On my travels, I saw a Pearl Jam concert in Seattle stadium in the space needle park.  I moshed actively at this show until I was sandwiched and had to retreat from the deafening loudspeakers at the front of the crowd.  It was a stunning concert.

The last concert I saw was The Dead and Company with John Mayer at Riverbend.  This was a wonderful concert at which Bob Weir and John Mayer excelled.

Chapter 3

My junior year, I moved off campus to an apartment community in the Duke forest.  I had begun mountain biking for transportation and thrills.  I would ride my mountain bike to and from class on campus.  I also rode in the Duke forest.  Duke owns extensive tracts of land which it uses to train its forestry students.  There are forest roads and single track trails in the forest.  I began to ride them, usually alone, for exercise and kicks.

I had a favorite route that I used to ride in the Duke forest.  It was off a secondary road between Durham and Chapel Hill.  First, I would ride down a dirt forest road and turn onto a medium downhill which led in a sweeping bend to a bridge over a creek bed.  It was all uphill from there, but I was in good enough shape then to enjoy the uphill grind, through single track, back to the forest road.

It was in my junior year that I began reading The New York Times. It further improved my vocabulary. My knowledge of  international relationships and business deepened.  

By my junior year, I had abandoned the premedical direction of my education and shifted completely to the humanities.  I continued to take classes in the English department.  I also began to study in the Literature (formerly Comparative Literature) department and in the Art History department.  

It was in an Art History class that we studied Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain.  This piece of work mystified me at first.  It was a work of criticism that crossed over into a discussion about political torture.  This work influenced me to work with Amnesty International later in my college career.

In the English Department, I recall taking classes on Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Virginia Woolf’s body of work, and the contemporary novelist Don DeLillo.  I was delighted by Chaucer’s ribald humor.  His big book of life, The Canterbury Tales, seemed to me unmatched until I read Shakespeare and Joyce.

In the Virginia Woolf class, we ran into some controversy.  Stanley Fish was head of the Duke English department but the New Critics were present in the department too.  At the time, the English Department was divided between the New Critics and the anti-canon, theoretically-informed, new practitioners of teaching English. 

Fish was considered canon, because he wrote on Milton, but theory, because he wrote on Milton in a way informed by contemporary continental philosophy.  Thus, he was a shoe in the door for theory.  I still don’t know much more than this about Fish, and for that matter Milton, so I will consult Wikipedia and see what I gleen.

Fish developed a concept called “interpretative communities.”  These communities interpreted texts according to their own common background and history.  While this was developed from “reader  response” theory, Fish elaborated it into an entirely new way of looking at epistemology (Stanley Fish, Wikipedia).  

Fish was head of the Department of English at Duke from 1986-1998 (the entire time of my study in that department from which I earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1990).  It seemed we shared some things in common.  His background was industrial (his father was a contractor); my background was industrial (my father managed a chemical tower and later became a plant manager).  Both our fathers insisted on a university education.  

At Duke, Fish was known for the lavish salaries he paid to the professors that he hired.  He was one of the founders of the modern intellectual star system.  He became a regular contributor to the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (Wikipedia).  

The old New Critics emphasized close reading and the celebration of modernist high cultural texts in the language of the texts themselves.  Modernism is a closed hermetic system and the New Critics thought close readings could interpret texts through knowledge of literary devices. 

My professor in the Virginia Woolf class was a New Critic.  He refused to speak about Virginia Woolf in feminist terms and penalized those who did.  He gave me a D- on my first paper in which I considered Woolf a feminist, but he let me rewrite it.  

When I was talking to him after class one day, he recommended A Glossary of Literary Terms.  At the time I was struggling with Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughghlin’s Critical Terms for Literary Study.  I found it as broad and deep as the Glossary, but more theoretically informed and sophisticated. 

In graduate school I would go on to read in Raymond William’s Keywords.  Its Marxist redefinitions of literary terms should be considered in this list of literary encyclopedias.

In a welcome challenge to the canon, I spent an entire semester with Frank Lentricchia in a class on the contemporary author Don DeLillo. By then, DeLillo had amassed  an impressive cornucopia of books.  Ratner’s Star impressed me the most.  I thought White Noise was the most amusing of his books. I would later teach the tongue in cheek and warmly humane White Noise to my own students.  But I first read this work of academic satire in college and appreciated its irony.

My senior year, 1989-1990, I moved to the Erwin Square apartments on Durham’s 9th street.  This apartment complex had once been a tobacco warehouse like many of the buildings in Durham.  Durham and Duke were built on the success of Bull Durham cigarettes.  When I was in school, you could still get a pack of cigarettes for a buck at the student center’s convenience store. Now they are around ten dollars a pack.

Chapter 5

The vibe on 9th Street was bohemian and health food was available and popular.  There was a grocery store there called Wellspring which would later be moved to the center of downtown when it was bought by Whole Foods.  I began to eat healthy food.  My roommates and I also often ate or got carry out from the Vietnamese restaurant across the street. 

I got my books from The Regulator Bookstore on 9th Street.  I marveled recently at a book that I had purchased there for later reading. This book was Baudrillard’s America. I read it later on in life.  The Regulator Bookstore was a leading light in Durham and affected the vibe on 9th Street. 

Also on the 9th Street of the time was the 9th Street bakery.  I sometimes started my day at this bakery with a pastry and coffee because their pastry was delicious and crunchy, and their coffee, of which I had begun to drink abundantly, was clean and good.  On Sundays in particular, I would dawdle with my girlfriend over the Sunday Times, coffee, and pastry.

Chapter 6

It was somewhere around this time that I took a class in the Literature department with Janice Radway.  Her point of emergence came from her book on the romances, including the Harlequin romances, that she saw as wrongfully stigmatized and of value to women in their everyday lives. Her reading of the romances was influenced by the ways in which romance readers respond to the texts they enjoy.

In this context, we also studied women’s magazines to recognize the value they have for women’s lives.  The romances and women’s magazines were regarded contemptuously by the traditional patriarchs that manned the parapets guarding the archive of their approved literary canon against the feminine and the lowbrow.  

Now, the lowbrow is studied as assiduously in the university as the traditional works of western culture.  Romances, women’s magazines, movies, television, cartoons, are all subjected to study and interpretation.  I felt this loosening of the boundaries of the canon liberating and wrote a research paper for Professor Radway’s class on phallocentric symbolism in a video game arcade.

#

Chapter 7

It was during this time that I studied with Professor Fredric Jameson.  Jameson was a frequent Chair of the Literature Department at Duke but still took time to work with undergraduates.  Another student and I took an independent study on cyberpunk science fiction with him.  The most famous book from this type of science fiction is, arguably, Neuromancer by William Gibson.  It won the Hugo and the Nebula awards in 1984.  It is about an artificial intelligence’s quest to free itself from its limitations so it can respond to one of its kind in a distant solar system.

I had previously taken a summer term class with Jameson in which we read Lukács. I found the Lukács as difficult as the Scarry, and it was not until graduate school that I began to comprehend theoretical texts and locate their position on the timeline (diachronic) and in the developing intellectual framework (synchronic) that I had begun constructing in my mind.  

So while I found Jameson mystifying at first, his intellect and breadth of knowledge are remarkable even amongst MLA academics, his enumeration of the relevant texts of cyberpunk, by then numerous, I scribbled down in my notes.  It could have been the foundation of a great dissertation, but I took a different turn.

I recall an exchange I had with Professor Jameson about a book called Islands in the Net. In this book, a couple agrees to be filmed constantly for their own protection. I wasn’t adverse to the idea, but the lack of privacy must have been very uncomfortable.  In the novel, the main characters decide to transform their skin to black to avoid sunburn.  I thought this a little naive, but an interesting idea.   It was an interesting book, but I wrote about consolidation in the newspaper industry for my term paper.

Jameson was awarded the Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement in 2012.  This was only the sixth award given in this category by the old and esteemed Modern Language Association (Wikipedia) a US professional association which governs the teaching of culture in English departments in America.

The fact that we were studying science fiction in a prestigious university like Duke was remarkable.  But Duke was open to new ideas and an expanded range of subject matter.  At the time of my matriculation Duke was rated top 10 in the nation by US News and World Report.  The Literature department, more than the English department, was receptive to mass culture as an object of literary study.  

We have already seen how Professor Radway included romances and women’s magazines, and how Jameson worked on science fiction as well as being deeply read in philosophy and criticism.  While many of the texts he celebrates are from high culture, he also accepted the challenge of interpreting what used to be called the “lowbrow” in his studies of music, science fiction, and film.

Chapter 8

It was in this context of the liberation of texts from the domination of a stodgy, old, white, male, high literary canon, that I began to think about a project in Duke Honors English.  I was thinking about writing a research paper on The Grateful Dead’s lyrics conceived as poetry.  I thought better of it and decided not to pursue the matter, but at the time, I liked their line “The sky was yellow and the sun was blue.”  Their lines were clever and I thought them worthy of critique.  In lyrics from a tune called “Fire on the Mountain” (which is a hexagram in the I Ching if you want to continue your research there), the vocalists for the Grateful Dead sang, “Success in business/I wish it for you/And more than just ashes/When your dreams come true.”  I wanted a life of quality, and I thought I would leave the amassing of quantity to others. Quantity wasn’t worth the price you paid in the American rat race.  I preferred the scholarly life of the University.

The American Dream is an ideological illusion and a misrepresentation of America. The US has become one of the most highly stratified and unfree countries in the world.  Can a unified culture keep us from slipping into anarchy?  What did you have, in the end, but an agonizing death from cancer with your head in the sand “down south,” as Pink Floyd sardonically sang during this period.  

The suit life, saving for a rich retirement, was often tragically cut short in the end by poor health, a paucity of cultural knowledge, or the frustration men suffer in retirement at the loss of their command.  This is all amplified by retirement-age dementia.

I found the freedom of life in the university comfortable, and its possibilities stimulating and ever promising.  While university work provides the best quality of life in the US, it incorporates a rat race of its own.  Can quantity buy you quality anyway?  

I really don’t think so.  The world is disgusted by waste and the pretenses of posers.  It is d disgusted by the flash and cash of criminals.  Puzo wrote in the epigraph to The Godfather, “every fortune is based on a crime.”  Marx thought property itself, during the time of enclosure, and capitalistic labor, with its extraction of surplus value, forms of theft. 

The quality of life has to be present in the process and in the method of one’s work life to make a person truly free.  Every day is a conflict, and one must be present in the fight to make life worth living.  One’s work life must be a struggle to make it worthwhile.  One must overcome continuously and make the effort for self improvement a part of every day.  The work is the truth.

I liked the Grateful Dead’s album Terrapin Station.  The Dead are popular in Maryland where the ‘Terps play. Terrapin Station had a tune on it with lyrics that read something like “... [the]  goal is to shed light, not to master.”  This was very much my mood at the time.  I was searching for illumination and it wasn’t until I got to graduate school that I began to see the larger picture of the puzzle of documents I was reading as I slowly began to fill in the puzzle’s frame with the connected pieces from my systematic reading.  

In graduate school, I began to seek Benjaminian illuminations. These conceptual illuminations, brought about by the juxtaposition of different constellations of ideas, helped me to understand my textual world.  

When I was at Duke, I identified knowledge with literary interpretation and Zen revelation.

The lyrics, “[the] goal is to shed light, not to master,” still resonate with me today.  I have a Master’s degree.  I was awarded my diploma in 1993 by Pitt’s English department (though I did not attend the ceremony).  I proceeded on at Pitt, teaching and taking seminars, until January 1998. I left early and for good, due to illness, but I had managed to earn a cumulative GPA of 3.981.

Because I pursued my doctorate for five years after my 1993 MA, I am well versed in literature and literary criticism.  I understand many of the books of our western cultural archive themselves and the books written about the primary works of literature which are themselves called literary criticism.  I studied to be a doctor in Philosophy.  

I see my MA degree with irony.  The more I learn, the more I learn how much more there is to learn. I am familiar with hundreds of books. There are thousands of books left to learn before I will claim the expertise of literary laurels. 

There is an empty void to fill.  You can fill it with one book, and embrace Christianity like a unicyclist or you can wake up to the diverse body of world literature with its abundance of religions and cultures to consider.  The monotheist might reply, "How many tires do you really need on the ground in this arena?"  

There is a vacuum of the unknown to be filled with knowledge by the recumbent textual eyeballs of the literary explorer.  The space of this void expands the more we learn.  Education, self-improvement, should only stop with illness or death.   Which is to say I am  a secular humanist.  

I have read most of the Bible, at times, with reverence.  My early exposure in Kerouac led me to revere the Buddha.  I still plan to read The Quran, The Upanishads, the Bag Vadiva, and The Rig Veda–which is to say that I am very spiritual.

When my diploma for my Master's degree came in the mail, I had some time to evaluate what I had learned.  I was happy with my teaching,  I worked hard at it and I had witnessed improvements in my students.  My satisfaction was qualified by Goethe’s poetic lines that follow.  Socially immature but mentally advanced, I sometimes felt like a trained seal or a “poor fool.”

And here, poor fool, I stand once more,

No wiser than I was before

I have led my pupils by the nose—

And see there is nothing we can know!

I do not pretend to worthwhile knowledge,

Don’t flatter myself I can teach in college,

So I resorted to Magic’s art,

To see if by spirit mouth and might

Many a secret may come to light.

So I need toil no longer so,

Propounding what I do not know (Goethe.  Faust.).

I seek to bring to light the spirit of the liberal arts.  While this self conscious reflection on the illusion of mastery would later lead me to despair (when my sense of humor failed), at the time I did not yield to cynicism.  I regarded my position at the time as a Teaching Assistant in English composition with good natured humor and irony.

Mastery, the illusion of absolute knowledge, can be a trap. Mastery can come with smug satisfaction and an end to further enquiry.  Mastery is always only partial.  There is no perfect map.  We can’t read all of the texts in all of the languages ever produced on this planet in one lifetime.  Maybe an artificial intelligence could.  Human knowledge will always remain partial and limited by human finitude.  We all will die.  Some leave a written record for the next generation to build on.  

Consciousness and knowledge will either dissipate at death as we fade into inanimate nonexistence (as most scientists and doctors believe), reset in an appropriately reincarnated form, or be maintained in a somehow eternal soul.

How do we best fill the time left to us, for we can have no certain knowledge of life after death that is not speculative, and no knowledge of the religions of the epochs that does not require superstition and delusion to be believed?  

The role of the self consciously radical (in the sense of “always historicizing” or “exposing the roots” of the dilemma) and critical (critical of the present world because hopeful of a better one) intellectual that I adopted at this time.

Chapter 9

I listened to The Grateful Dead and to other heroes of mine from the 60s counterculture.  I became a late eighties college hippie.  We wore bohemian garments.  I grew my hair long.  Women often went unshaven.  I let my beard grow too. I attended two Grateful Dead concerts in North Carolina and one in Chicago.  There were people like me at these events and I was reminded of my time soloing with the Rainbow People.

Before freshman year in college began, some incoming  students joined together in a Duke-led group to backpack in the Pisgah National Forest.  I had been a scout, and an athlete, so naturally I joined them. We trekked around the Appalachian mountains in the August heat and rain.  It was really quite demanding.

Our group would gather together under a tarp in our sleeping bags at night.  When it rained, everyone on the edges would get wet and try to press inward, while those inside the periphery would share the warmth of the interior produced by body heat. 

On this trip, we were to have a solo day.  On solo day, I came across a stranger in the woods sitting in a tent by a river and she told me about the Rainbow Gathering–for they were gathering in that very same park, at the very same time, for their annual celebration.  

The Rainbow Gathering is a group of hippies of all ages who meet in the parks for a Bacchanalian soma-fueled summer celebration every year.  

Chapter 10

My senior year, I became active with Amnesty International.  I was disenchanted with the limitations of the twin party politics of the land.  In this context, I turned to activism as something real to do in the face of a spectrum of politics that seemed very limited in a twin party nation. 

Amnesty International is simple and to the point.  Participants write letters to officials in power in foreign countries, and notably not to the letter writer’s own country, to let these officials know that the offending government is being watched by the eyes of the world and that they are responsible for the welfare of the prisoners of conscience in their prisons.  

These prisoners of conscience are people who have not committed any crime but are imprisoned because of their political beliefs.  The imprisoned were often tortured.  So, it was with grave concern that I participated in a letter writing campaign to release a prisoner of conscience.  This letter writing campaign was successful and we celebrated a prisoner release.

I was no red diaper kid.  In fact, I had been raised in the go go corporate 80s (My father worked in big business and now owns a factory and some real estate. My mother owns a farm). In the late 80, and through the 90s, I was moved by disgust to become anti capitalist but not Communist—particularly in graduate school.  I was unimpressed by the politics of the day and sought some kind of active form of praxis. From early on in my life, I was impressed by the rewarding value (the celebration of a prisoner release) and tactical effectiveness (divestment) of political activism.

My study of English Literature in the English Department at Duke, from 1986-1990, seemed to present an alternative to the go go corporate Eighties.  Most people at Duke at the time sought to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, or corporate traders.  

Though I was poor, I wanted to study English literature with the idea of maybe being a teacher or novelist someday.  This was at a time when, entrenched in Reaganism, public monies were being shifted away from education and into the military complex because of an over-inflated sense of the danger the Russian bear might pose.  Recall, the Berlin wall fell in 1989–just before I graduated with my BA.

Mine was a more ancient form of anti-capitalism.  It was pre-capitalist.  Maybe I longed for rural peace.  Maybe I came to see the university as separate from the wider world.  It was as if Duke was my Oxford, cloistered away as it was amid its array of libraries.  It was as C. S. Lewis had written in his poem “Oxford.”

But this shall never be;

To us remains

One city that has nothing of the beast,

That was not built for gross, material gains,

Sharp, wolfish power or Empire’s glutted feast.

In Duke’s department of English, we students were to learn everything from Beowulf  to Virginia Woolf.  The department was headed by Stanley Fish (the Miltonist) and so emergently theoretical if residually canonical.  

Fish (Department Chair of the Duke English Department) and Fredric Jameson (Department Chair of the Duke Literature Department) were allied when I studied there.  I took classes in both Departments and also in The Art History Department.  At Duke, The Art History Department and the Literature Department were located on the brick East Campus.  The English Department was located on the gothic West Campus.

I took an introductory class in the Art History department.  We had one, glossily illustrated textbook.  We students spent most of our classes in a darkened room looking at slide images projected on a screen.  These images were mostly of painting and sculpture.  I believe we began with French cave paintings, worked chronologically through the history of western art, and ended up somewhere around Hopper.

These art images burned themselves into my mind.  I found, when we were quizzed, that if I could just remember the image of the art in question, knowledge would spill out into my mind.  I was a visual learner for I had spent much of my youth reading which is, after all, a visual medium.

Next, I took a class on Modern Architecture.  I thought Modernism’s “form follows function” simplicity and modest minimalism were tasteful.  Then I had Postmodernism to consider, for this class was my first exposure to it.  I liked Ghery’s tin roof and chain link postmodern home.  It blended into the landscape of postmodern LA.

In another art history on performance art, we read Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain.  This book was a little much for me at the time for it was not until graduate school that I began reading books essentially written by PhD’s for other PhD’s to consider.  The Body and Play though had achieved more popularity than some of the other academic work.  I remember one of its salient points: that great pain is not always visible.

Chapter 11

I continued some political activism accidentally when the CIA recruited on campus.  I happened upon a protest of thousands of people, protesting CIA recruitment on campus, in the main quad by chance.  These protesters were a group of faculty, staff, and students who objected to “the fire in the hemisphere below.”  I think this was 1988.  Iran-contra had just gone down, and the protesters were in a tizzy.  Together with the protesters, we occupied the Allen Building, the site of some administrative offices and the headquarters of my own English department, to protest CIA recruitment on campus. 

I recall that CIA agents photographed individual protesters from afar with telephoto lenses.  We thought this might be for later retaliation, but for a day we were united in our disgust for our nation’s violent, murderous, and underhanded foreign policy.

Chapter 12

I think it was in my senior year at Duke that I saw Billy Bragg in concert in Chapel Hill.  His music inspired me more than The Grateful Dead at the time.  He sang of solidarity and revolt.  His humble and workmanlike performance, one man with a guitar in a lecture hall, impressed me with its modesty and skill.  He sang 

“Mixing pop and politics. He asked me what the use is.  I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses. While looking down the corridor. Out to where the van is waiting. I'm looking for the Great Leap Forward.”

Perhaps my response to Bragg is a bit like that of the “fanzine writer,” but my experience and education at Duke was informed, from my Freshman year, by the perception that the third world, from Cuba to Vietnam, was being victimized by the United States. US authoritarianism seemed part and parcel of authoritarianism across the globe. I became sympathetic with the developing world and revolted by my own government’s covert conduct and private wars.

“Waiting for the Great Leap Forward” was an inspirational call to activism. It suggests “jumble sales” “pamphlets,” “parties,” and “T-shirts” as practical tactics for political struggle and social change. These practical tactics were not to be dismissed. 

I was frustrated by this notion of “waiting.” There was a notion in the left wing that dialectical materialism progressed inevitably from Feudalism to Capitalism, and then to Socialism the stage prior to Communism. The belief in the scientific inevitability of reason over violence has done much to hurt the effectiveness of the left wing.

More interesting than this boilerplate analysis, since we are within a capitalist mode of production, is the identification of the various formations of capitalism itself like Taylorism, Fordism, Just in Time Inventory, Monopoly capitalism, Multinational capitalism, and Postmodern capitalism, to name a few of the historical types of  capitalism.  The current mode of production, globally, contains all these types as either residual or emergent.

Another Billy Bragg song was popular with me in this time of transition.  It spoke to me as a California summer child, with a heavy overlay of midwestern rust belt, and some southern hospitality.  This cautionary tune seemed meant for my ears as a young American about to graduate into the wider world. The tune was called “Help Save the Youth of America” and it goes like this, 

“From the Big Church to the Big River. And out to the Shining Sea. This is the Land of Opportunity. And there's a Monkey Trial on TV.” 

I only use my television set, (an old 4K Hisense 42”) for movies (I have a Sony BluRay player), video games (I have a Nintendo Switch), and YouTube (Alphabet soup).  

This tune spoke to me as a “youth of America.” It struck me as a dire warning about the likelihood of nuclear war and human extinction. It also rejected the youthful apathy of the students who subscribed to the values of their parent’s generation. These values, corrupted by power, symbolized by those paternalistic white fathers in government and enforced by the police and military seemed wholly at odds with my values of liberality and sympathy.  To paraphrase Bob Dylan, “this world is controlled by violence, not democracy.”

I thought at the time that the white fathers were in search of violent world domination.  They seek to control the world.  Is this military goal inappropriate in a multipolar world?  Billy Bragg sang, “You can fight for democracy at home. And not in some foreign land.”

These words rang true. What on earth were we doing trying to dominate the world?  Was WW1 fought for democracy or to ensure the territorial gains of the imperialist powers?  We are not in a unipolar world as we were said to be in the 1990s.  American weapon systems were designed to match the Soviet threat, but the Russians have huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons which they may use tactically in the Ukraine. 

We are said to be funding a defensive war in the Ukraine, but we are dangerously close to an aggressive war in China.  We do ourselves a disservice when we shake the saber at China.  They readily perceive their encirclement by US bases.  China looms large and we can’t, and shouldn’t try, to take them.  The enemies are not the Communists, but ourselves.

The politicians in the twin parties, which are two faces of the same coin, never tire of rattling the saber over China when the primary problems in the US are the debt and the majority of the planet’s intent to de dollarize.

I was educated at Duke.  Duke has an extensive campus in China.  Duke doesn’t see China as a threat, as the warmongering politicians do who shun peace because they like to keep the war factories humming in their districts, but as partners to be treated witj sensitivity and respect.  Their culture is vast, much older than ours, and worthy of study.

Politically, I had been radicalized early by the sight of pictures of emaciated bodies of emmaciated Jewish people stacked like cordwood next to a bulldozed grave at a Nazi concentration camp. From first exposure, I hated the Nazis and their genocidal, xenophobic, state militarism. Hitler was Sauron and his minions were orcs. 

The Nazi’s approach to Nietzsche differed greatly from my own. Nietzsche.  The Genealogy of Morals was part of our twenty five book reading list for the MA exam essays at Pitt and was attractive to me because of his active concept of “the transvaluation of all values.” Following from this concept that values could be improved, Nietzsche became a philosopher of liberation, not domination.

The idea is that people can overcome their own limitations. They can be changed by consciousness raising and education. Human beings can mature beyond their youth. I found “Help Save the Youth of America” a call to arms to the tune of anti-fascism, no nukes, and anti-militarism generally.

Perhaps “call to arms” overstates the matter. I am no Hemingway.  I am a product of the university not of revolutionary Spain and expat Paris.  While there are hostile Nazi’s in my neighborhood, I haven’t gone to war with them as Hemingway went to war with the fascists in Spain. He was maimed in the process of pursuing his ideals and would suffer from shrapnel and concussions for the rest of his life.  No wonder he drank so much.  He was in constant pain and alcohol is a powerful painkiller.  It was probably better for him than the electro-shock treatments after which he ate the gun and suicided.

Would Hemingway be fighting in the Ukraine today if he were still in the first blush of youth?  Would he be fighting for the Ukrainian or the Russians?  Personally, I feel my age and prefer the pen to the sword.  But I think about Hemingway and I wonder.  Where does our responsibility start?  Where does it end?  I peck away on my computing device and recall Woody Guthrie’s message  “This Machine Kills Fascists.”

Another tune I liked in school was from the Grateful Dead. It too was directed to the youth and to the Grateful Dead’s ever-youthful fans who were hippies of all ages. The tune was called “Eyes of the World.”

The idea that the rock and roll of youth, judging with its eyes, and singing the song of the emergent “mornin,” could condemn the values of the 1950s parental generation in the name of the new feminism, anti-racism, and pacifism.  The idea was that rock and roll with a conscience could change the world. 

This was a common notion among the youth of the 60s.  The eyes of the new youth would become the moral compass of the world, if they could just open the eyes of perception and unite against the malevolent and authoritarian white fathers.  The hippies did succeed in their goals, in some respects, and we exist on an entirely new political terrain then we did before they came to be.

Chapter 13 

I graduated from Duke with my class in 1990 though I had completed my course work a semester early.   I had a rocky start, scoring a 2.7 grade point average after my first freshman semester, but by my senior year, I had made the Honor Roll with a cumulative GPA of 3.3.

For this I received $10,000 from home.  I immediately spent half of it to purchase a souped up Apple computer, a SE/30.  I knew even then that I wanted to continue my acquisition of knowledge.  As an avid reader, for whom books were more interesting than most people, I also knew that I wanted to try my hand at writing.  At the time, I was unsure what kind of career path this would entail, but I knew it would involve reading and writing. I resolved to continue in the university. 

Chapter 14

I took the ACT Exam in Raleigh early one morning.  I did well and it helped me in finding a graduate school.  I remember vividly listening to The Cure’s Disintegration cassette at high volume on the drive from Durham to NC State through the predawn morning to take the test.  The Cure’s tragically gothic tones had come to blend with my perpetual uncertainty and long felt melancholy. It was a time of transitions, endings, and new beginnings.

Book 12

Chapter 1

It was 1989 that I had seen the Berlin wall torn down on corporate television.  It was at this point of the extreme exhaustion of the Soviet state that I began to be influenced by Marxist aesthetic theory.  While regional communism had not survived its admixture with world capitalism, the goal of liberation still seemed vital to women, African Americans, Chicanos, Native Americans, the poor majority, and soldiers at war.  As a student in an elite university who had it pretty soft, I felt obligated to speak up for those who needed liberation in my writing if, of course, imperfectly. Maybe it is better to let the subaltern speak for themselves, but I sympathized with these American underdogs.

While I had applied to several graduate schools, I wasn't accepted anywhere in 1990 and would have to wait a year to apply to a new selection of graduate schools.

I had a year to kill before graduate school, so I moved to Park City, Utah.  This town, clustered in a mountain valley around a rushing river, was beautiful that summer.  The air was dry, the heat was warm after the sun came up, and there was a crisp breeze and inspirational views at the summit of Park City Mountain. 

Chapter 2 

I brought my mountain bike to Park City.  It was a Supergo (since bought by Performance Cyclery).  I had purchased it directly from the factory in Taiwan.  I assembled it myself, but it sure ran better when I had it tuned at Bull Durham Cyclery.  I bought the mountain bike with some money I had made working in a factory.  

I liked this factory job.  I was in shipping and I worked under the direction of the head shipper, a woman, who I soon learned was stronger than me and more familiar with the different shipping systems.  We worked well together, and the days passed in a steady flow as we packed up boxes and stacked them for shipping.  

We listened to the radio.  We listened to public radio news in the morning and rock and roll during the afternoons.  The day seemed to fly by in easy banter and when the truck came at the end of the day to pick up our work, there was a sense of satisfaction.

I made the most of the mountain bike I purchased.  It was one of the first imaginings of what a mountain bike could be.  Mountain bike manufacture was then in its infancy.  The designs of the bikes kept changing.  At the time, mountain biking was in its youth and I  paused before every parked mountain bike I saw to admire the new differences in every improved design.  

My Supergo was built of chromoly steel.  It had no active suspension, just the flex of the frame itself.  The Supergo mountain bike had its rear brake attached to its bottom bracket.  This was a design feature that had both pros and cons, but has since been mostly abandoned.  

Rock Shox, a feature which gave the forks some suspension travel up front, were newly on the market but I got used to the shimmy in the unsuspended front end during downhill riding.  The chromoly steel forks would shimmy, but they didn’t give way under the pressure of downhill riding in which gravity puts most of the weight on the front wheel while the rider tries to shift his or her weight back over the rear wheel. I got used to this shimmying sensation in the forks.

I would leave my small apartment and ride up the street to the single track that climbed up the face of the Park City mountain in switchbacks. Climbing up these steep switchbacks was very tiring at first.  I only gradually got hardened to mountain riding.  But I made it up those switchbacks to the summit of Park City, locked in a low climbing crouch, nearly every time.  I developed the endurance of a cyclist.  Though a smoker, I still had good stamina.  But it would take weeks in Park City, riding up the mountain in an agonized crouch, until I was hardened enough to ride up the mountain without discomfort.

I would pause, when I reached the summit of Park City mountain, and look back, across, and down the slope that I had just ascended, to the mountain ranges stretching out to the far horizon, and I would feel alone, satisfied, and at peace.

The ride down the other side of  the mountain was a thrill.  This downhill was composed of broken rock and proceeded in fast gradual curves from the summit of the mountain to the road at the top of the valley’s mountain rivulet.  This mountain road proceeded down, through town, to my apartment.

Chapter 3

It was in Park City that I began to play video games on the Turbografx-16 video game system.  This video game console had an 8 bit processor and a 16 bit graphics video card. The Turbografx-16 video game console competed with Nintendo and Sega. I had gained the Turbografx-16 console and games in a temporary trade for my Sega Genesis console and some games.  

This trade was with someone with whom I would write an incomplete epistolary novel a little on in life when he was still in graduate school and after I had left graduate school either on leave of absence or after I packed it in and left for good.

I liked the trade because through it I could experience a new console and a new library of games.  The Turbografx-16 was a little different from the Sega Genesis (which had a 16 bit processor and a 16 bit graphics video card), but they both had games that were complex and strategic.  Many games of the time were side scrollers and I enjoyed them too.

I began playing video games in junior high school during the summer.  We had an early Atari and we would play Space Invaders, Centipede, Adventure, Pac Man, and many more.  

I find video games personally valuable.  Even today, I try to reserve a little part of each day to play.  I find this either relaxing or exciting depending on the type of game.  I select a game to match my mood.  Because of the interactive quality of video games, I sometimes prefer them to the passive medium of television for entertainment. This interactivity, or at least selectivity, is also present in YouTube.  The viewer gets to decide the specific topic, and limit his or her advertising exposure, on one of the widest selections of video content on the internet.

Chapter 4

In Park City, I soon ran out of money.  The $10,000, of which I had committed half to cover the expense of an amped up computer, had been spent and I would have to work.  So, I packed everything I had come with into my little 1986 VW Golf GTI: 2 futons, my SE/30, desk, desk chair, clothing and sundries, and traveled back to Cincinnati. 

I stopped over at my grandfather’s place in town in Nebraska.  He was larger than life to me.  He was taller.  He was louder.  He had never had a son. 

My wallet was empty, I had been running on credit, and he filled my wallet with enough cash for gas and expenses on the way home.  I admired him for this, because when I later opened my wallet to reach for my credit card, there had been a nice surprise. 

It was this grandfather who would fund my first year in graduate school.  After a year off, I had been accepted at SUNY Stony Brook, The University of Michigan, and The University of Pittsburgh.  When I decided to go to Pitt, this grandfather came through and paid for my first year.  I earned a full scholarship, where I would work as both a teacher and a student, after my first year of school.  I would proceed as a Teaching Assistant, and later, after I was promoted, as a Teaching Fellow, at Pitt until I quit premature of my PhD requirements in January 1998. 

Chapter 5 

But just back from Park City, during the year in between graduation and the start of graduate school, I returned to factory work.  I resolved to make some fast money and return to Durham to see my college girlfriend before I departed for graduate school.  

I managed a small second shift in a woodworking factory. This factory shift management job made hobby horses.  This toy was being made with the same line of woodworking equipment as the other products. The factory also made replacement piano benches. The most luxurious commodity they made was the adjustable artist’s bech.  It could be finished to any color and encased in leather.

The factory had been purchased second hand.  It contained substandard machinery and it was in a dying rust belt industry.  Most piano benches are now made in China.  US factories cannot compete with the cost of skilled labor in China or so I am told.  In addition, in the past, a piano was considered a necessary part of every middle class family home.  My mother had a piano in her parent’s home and at one point practiced for five hours a day.  But people interested in piano these days don’t purchase parlor pianos, as in the past when they were sold in the Sears Roebuck catalog, but portable electronic keyboards or synthesizers.  These are cheaper and more portable. Some of the synthesizers are very complex.

This second hand company only survived by moving from downtown Cincinnati, Beekman Street to Hamilton, Ohio and abandoning most of its unprofitable music business for coffin handles, a necessity during the COVID epidemic, churned out by an overworked CNC.  

I was far from the liberal arts I had been trained in.  During my education, I had heard mills referred to by an early Christian moralist as “dark and satanic.”  The factory, where I worked at night, was dark.  Light pooled around the machinery stations but did little to penetrate the darkness of the interior of the factory.

As for its “satanic” quality, I wasn’t so sure.  Maybe capitalism was postlapsarian.  Maybe it was a result of being thrown out of Eden—though feudalism was not peaches and cream.  It’s easy to romanticize the past.  Many of the early Christian moralists and political economists rejected capitalism as dangerous and exploitative of the women and children that populated the swelling ranks of the working class poor.  It was for later Christian moralists, like the Calvinists, to recuperate capitalism and identify capitalist success with God’s favor and salvation.

The workers were making money, but the work was often repetitive, unrewarding, and difficult.  One day, the dust control system got clogged, we had filled a dumpster with sawdust and we had more sawdust.  We would have to burn it in the boiler.  The whole crew spent the entire shift shoveling sawdust into a boiler furnace.  We wore masks because there was so much dust.  It was hard, hot, and miserable work.  I had to fire a guy who wouldn’t shovel for insubordination.  I shoveled too.  This was probably the worst night of work for us at the factory.

I made it through my stint there without overseeing any worker injuries.  For this, I felt fortunate because the factory was dangerous.  It contained power saws, moving belts, and a massive molder that wouldn’t cut straight.  Nobody was injured while I was in charge. 

I had strong suspicions about the desirability of capitalism as an economic system in itself and my time on Beekman Street only made them more acute. I had been given the power of command, but it was not until later that I would bloom as a teacher

Book 13

Chapter 1

At the time, I was influenced by the series Star Trek the Next Generation which was newly emergent at the time.  I sought a bridge position, informed and technocratic, like the men and women sailing away on a journey of exploration in their starship.  This secular team—including aliens, prophets, and telepaths—seemed an improved and mature substitute group for the patriarchal family. 

I soon shifted from a waitstaff position at another restaurant to a third man position at a seafood restaurant and deli in downtown Durham, NC called Fishmongers.  Fishmongers served fish and seafood.  The seafood was packed in ice for the owner and he would transport it back to the restaurant/deli from the coast.  This was a distance of 150 miles.  

The restaurant also had seasonal seafood.  In blue crab season, we served blue crabs by the half pec or pec smothered in Old Bay seasoning.  We had steamers most of the time and we always had shrimp, mussels and oysters. There was a tank for lobster so the customer could select their own lobster to eat.

I worked directly for the owner, but when we were cooking, I was at the disposal of the first or second chef.  I would run the fry cooking machine, wash dishes, and when things were slack, filet or steak fish for the deli.

The owner opened up a bar on the second floor of the restaurant and I worked there, serving beer and bringing up food on the dumb waiter, on the night shift.  I wonder what would have happened to me if I had stayed in Durham as Duke working class and never gone on to graduate school.  Durham is a nice place to check out.  I might have been happier.

Book 14

Chapter 1

I entered graduate school in the fall of 1990.  The humanities were in decline and under attack from the right wing; capitalism was dominant and invasive; the university now increasingly demanded profit and patents from the research and development of their employees.  The majority of monies in most university total budgets came from the Pentagon.  

The globe was seemingly unipolar in the early 90s. It wasn’t our military that won out against the Russians, but our economic system.  Capitalism was not good for Russia and it led to increased inequality, as raw capitalism does, and the solidification of a new oligarchic ruling class when the Russian state sold off its assets. 

It was in this environment that I immersed myself in literary study and texts about literary aesthetics.  It was my point of view (along with many academics in the liberal arts), that Marxist literary theory was one of the most powerful tools for interpreting literature, because the times were supersaturated by the era’s uncritical and smug capitalism (in all its regional and global forms and adaptations).  This did not make me a Communist but a materialist (which precedes capitalism and communism).

I liked Obama because he was an avid reader and kept the political tone elevated.  I voted for him in 2008.  I knew enough to know that Obama was stymied by the right wing party’s obstinate obstructionism.

This obstinate obstructionism surfaced here in Ohio where I currently reside. In Ohio, backroom Republican influences legally reduced the time in which it was permissible to get an abortion to six weeks as it is in the deep south and some retrograde states in the plains. Some women don’t even know they’re pregnant at six weeks, I am told.  

This reduction to six weeks was quickly postponed by the courts in Ohio.  To get the matter on the ballot in November 2023, I participated with the ACLU in a signature campaign that ultimately received over 700,000 signatures in Ohio.  The right to an uncomplicated abortion is popular in Ohio.

The right wings’s counter to our signature campaign was to hold a special election on August 8th when many people are out of town, to extend from 50% to 60% the votes necessary to successfully put through an amendment to the state constitution.  We opposed the extension from 50% to 60% and sought to keep abortion accessible, safe, and legal in Ohio. 

We opposed any effort to make it more difficult to get an abortion. This special election to shift away from the status quo of 50%, to the new figure of 60%, was brought forward precisely to sink the proposed signature drive which sought, through an amendment to the state constitution, to outlaw the new curbs on abortion access.

I found that most people I conversed with on Fountain Square with my tactile handheld clipboard and ACLU credentials were either surprised by the attack on their rights or had heard about the attack and wanted to get involved with the effort to oppose these restrictions on their civil liberties and basic human rights. The new restrictive abortion law attacked the basic human right to bodily autonomy.

Well, the extension to 60% was rejected by the voters in Ohio. The county in which I reside rejected the Republican’s effort to restrict the power of the popular vote.

Chapter 2

Grandpa paid for the first year of my graduate study.  For this I was grateful.  He had been burned in an annuity scheme, and sought schooling so that he could hold his own in the business world.  He knew the value of education.  Grandpa was the son of a Czechoslovakian immigrant farmer who had bought farmland in Nebraska.

What I remember most about grandpa was his strength. He had incredible physical strength. He worked the farm he had inherited from my great grandfather with only one hired hand.  This work began in the time before tractors when horses and oxen were used to work the land.  Farming, unrelieved by modern machinery, demanded great physical labor.  He irrigated his fields with water from the river and he prospered.

Grandpa lost his wife to cancer early in their retirement. Most of his retirement, he lived alone. He had male friends, neighbors in town who he had known most of his life, with whom he daily played pool.  He was no stranger to vice and he and his friends drank and smoked moderately while they played.  He lived on to 93, outliving his wife by decades. He didn’t slip until the last six months of his lifespan when he succumbed to dementia.

He had lost his hearing and his wife so retirement must have been lonely.  He was a frequent hunter (which damaged his hearing), and he had been exposed to the first generation of ungoverned tractors (which were very loud).  He lost his hearing, and this affected him as a social being.  I remember him as aggressively friendly, vital, and robust.

After he helped me for the first year, I earned a TA scholarship to cover the rest of graduate school. I taught and attended classes for my remaining time at Pitt on a departmental scholarship as a teaching assistant.

Chapter 3

At first, I felt comfortable in my little efficiency apartment.  I began to read incessantly, for my graduate school classes were very interesting.  Taken together, I was reading the equivalent of at least three books a week every week.  I was driven and determined to keep up with my studies. 

In that first year, because I was not teaching yet, I had plenty of time to read, and began reading for most of the day and night.  This was a discipline I kept up for most of my time at Pitt and in the summers when I would return to my parent’s home in Cincinnati to read.  

I felt that I had a lot of reading to get caught up on.  I hadn’t had an emphasis on philosophy, as some of my new peers had. The Body in Pain and History and Class Consciousness were the limits of my critical comprehension at the time.  I had learned some literary appreciation, literary history, and literary criticism.  Now, I became interested in the philosophical roots of literary criticism and what is called “theory.” 

“Theory” is aggressively defended in Robert T. Tally Jr’s. For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists.  Tally was a classmate of mine at Pitt and a fellow Duke alumni.  He was from an old and political North Carolina family.  He had watched Duke basketball since he was a kid.  Rob and I sometimes drank beer and watched Duke basketball together at the College Inn that used to be open on Ellsworth or on the second floor of The Original in Oakland.  Now he is a tenured professor at Texas State in San Marcos. 

Tally popularized French geocriticism and literary cartography to American academics just like his mentor Fredric Jameson popularized Sartre and the Frankfurt school to a previous generation of American academics.  Tally has already written or edited a shelf full of books.

At the time, I resolved to reveal the fundamental roots of words, ideas, and concepts in my writing.  I resolved to be a radical intellectual.  This was to be my function and goal.  Both Tally and I, and our mentors Fredric Jameson and Paul Bové, are anti status quo thinkers.  We are self conscious about the anti hegemonic goals of our work. We thematize it in our work because reason demands progress.  I guess this affiliation of intellectuals, with roots in both Durham, NC (Duke) and Pittsburgh, PA (Pitt) might be called pitbulls.  Duke was known to be situated in the town in which the Durham Bull’s baseball players were the summer’s heroes.  In the movie Bull Durham, I have related to Nuke and the Veteran catcher just as in Moby Dick I have identified with both Ishmael and Ahab.

Personally, I feel obliged to take the progressive, anti status quo point of view. As an elite intellectual, who has lived on both sides of the track, I feel it is my responsibility to speak for those who are oppressed.  I acknowledge that this is a path fraught with the dangers of appropriation, but I sincerely want to make things better.

The status quo is opposed by oppositional critics who seek the unlimited, if often uneven, progression of thought past any commonsense, taboo, or normative status quo.  Oppositional critics insist on the importance of the imagination, and the progressive representation of events, for the creation of a better world.

I hope my work is grounded in philosophical fundamentals, but at the time, I was still, through reading, thinking, and writing, articulating these philosophically fundamental issues to myself.  I was learning esoteric knowledge, metaphysics, and cant, but I later soured on the more esoteric and arcane books of philosophy in favor of a critical approach to metaphysics and Western philosophy itself. 

There is a tendency, in academia, to use professional terms. My first two books of short stories were self consciously literary, difficult, but rewarding to decipher.  This memoir, based on my memory, is my effort at plain speaking for I want to share my perceptions as a public intellectual.

While I committed to a project on film, at home during the summers, I was reading novels.  I began to read deeply in the Russian novelists.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s psychological complexity impressed me.  I read Notes from the Underground, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, and The Possessed.  I liked Dostoyevsky’s keen social awareness and his existential elaborations.

Now, Dostoyevsky suffered for his art.  I think of him whenever I think of my own difficulties. Dostoyevsky wrote a novel, Crime and Punishment, about the killing of a landlord by a renter.  For this he was lined up for execution by the firing line. He was spared  execution though everyone else in his group was shot.  Dostoyevsky then spent four years in the Siberian penal system before six years of compulsory military service.  This cut into his literary maturity, though he would later publish voluminously.

I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace during summer break.  The steadiness of his rolling prose impressed me as a youthful writer.  The shuttling back and forth between the narratives of war and the narratives of peace–the conversation between the two—seemed dialectical to me. 

I tried to do something like this in the original structure of Konflagrations, in which I juxtaposed north and south. I ended up abandoning this rotary effect, and proceeded sequentially, in my final revisions of Konflagrations.

I read Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and wondered about Uncle Sam’s commitment to mass incarceration. This commitment to mass incarceration continued, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, until Obama, leading, called for reform. 

I lived through the Reagan eighties, but I had been fundamentally influenced by the 60s counterculture.  I smoked pot in my teens and twenties before laying off it in my thirties and forties.  I think I was self-medicating because, since 2019, I have vaporized cannabis as part of an Ohio legal medical marijuana program. I vaporize cannabis to alleviate chronic pain caused by arthritis. This is legal in Ohio.  Marijuana: buds, flowers, and edibles are prescribed to me for pain relief.  

I celebrate cannabis as an anodyne!  It is considered medication in Ohio.  According to Ohio law, marijuana can legally be prescribed to treat more than 25 ailments. For these ailments, it is considered by the doctor’s of Ohio to be therapeutic medicine. But in the Reagan eighties, I viewed the war on drugs, and the ballooning of the prison population, with alarm.

Of Nabokov, I read Ador, Pnin, and Pale Fire. While I admired the punning and humor of Pnin, I was a long way from appreciating coded banter. I did okay with irony, sarcasm, and wit, but simple banter eluded me.  I guess I am a late bloomer.

I read heavily in Dickens during one summer, and had something to match with the theories of capitalist realism that I would come to learn later.  During the summer, I also read Conrad.  His self-conscious articulation of capitalist dynamics, in Nostromo, I found rewarding.  When I read Heart of Darkness, it opened up new ways of interpreting one of my favorite films Apocalypse Now.  Yes, I liked Conrad.  An artist first, he had rejected knighthood when it was offered to him by the British monarchy.

Kafka, I read late.  But one summer, I read everything I could find of his.  His corpus, his body of work, is small and approachable. He seemed to speak to my own teleological frustration at ever reaching an end.  It was not until later that I would stop imagining an end to scholarship as some kind of total understanding of all that had been thought and said, and instead learn the ebb and flow or reading and writing, learning and teaching, necessary for graduate school life.

I was exercising in the morning with a series of movements said to be a warmup to Tai Chi.  The ebb and flow of this preparatory series of stretches kept me flexible and the twenty-five minute walk to campus kept my constitution robust.

Chapter 4

Shadyside, where I lived my first year in Pittsburgh, was known for its affluent well-tended urban houses.  With this neighborhood prosperity came crime from outside of the neighborhood.  My apartment was invaded while I was in it.  Someone bashed in the door to the kitchenette and advanced into the room.  As soon as I confronted him, he fled, but I would never be without a sense of vulnerability, even in my most secure dwellings.

It was while I was in Shadyside that the alloy wheels of my VW were stolen as I had been warned they might.  I woke up to find the VW gone from where I had parked it.  It was later found nearby in a detached garage up on cement blocks.  I replaced the wheels with some heavy steel wheels that could more easily stand up to Pittsburgh’s notorious potholes.  The wheels made the car ugly, but the VW had become the perfect urban transport.  It was a peppy performer, easy to park, immune to potholes, and too worn and ugly to steal.

Chapter 5 

I recall my dedication to my studies.  During my first year in Shadyside, I read constantly, only taking a break on Saturday nights.  Then, I would take my weekly copy of The Nation to a local bar and read in the dim light while drinking beer.  I had not yet learned the Pittsburgh way of taking a shot of liquor and a pint of beer. 

At Duke, the living groups had kegs once a week so there was free beer available nearly every night of the week. In Pittsburgh, some drank for two.  Traditionally, the steel workers would have a shot of liquor and a beer at a bar, like The Firehouse in Oakland, before their hot and difficult work. Then they would have a shot of liquor and a beer after work with their colleagues.  I picked up the habit in which a shot of liquor and a pint of beer defined one round.

Chapter 6 

The winter cold in my Shadyside apartment was nearly unbearable.  I would sit at my desk and read or write on my SE/30’s keyboard with fingerless gloves, a hat, and a coat to combat the winter cold.  Maybe my deportment reading alone at the bar on Saturday nights was viewed as too cold, for when I moved to the Southside, during the last months of my studies at Pitt, I would be frozen out again.  

Chapter 7 

It was during my first year in graduate school at Pitt that I began to study German for reading knowledge.  I had studied the German language at Duke so I took well to this new class. The PhD at Pitt required a language of fluency and a language of reading knowledge sufficient for research.  I planned to learn to read German so I could read the German philosophers in their native tongue (particularly Adorno, for his translators have been criticized).  I planned to become fluent in French, so I could understand the post-structuralists better, but I left school before this goal could be achieved.  I never learned the French language.

I cut a corner in the study of German.  Instead of taking a second semester of German, I resolved to study independently and take the final exam.  I later passed this exam, translating Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Goethe.

I met two friends in the first semester of German: one from Duke’s philosophy department, one a polymath from SUNY Buffalo.  The enviable personal library of the polymath encouraged me to expand my own personal research library to the point at which it rests today. 

I have a modest personal research library of approximately one thousand books. This may seem like a lot, if you’re not a regular reader, until you learn that the late author Umberto Eco had approximately 35,000 books in his personal library at the time of his death.

Chapter 8

At the time, I really wanted to succeed as an academic.  I had worked in many industries and liked the alternately peripatetic and then sedentary and scholarly lifestyle of academic life the best. I was not going to let distractions deter my success.  

I eliminated all distractions from my reading during this first year of study.  I had deliberately left my TV, VCR, and Sega Genesis behind.  Though I was ostensibly a film student, I even skipped the televised Oscar program.

This desire for success animated me.  Part of what made me appealing to Pittsburgh was my laborious youth because Pittsburgh’s respect for labor is well known.  I had not been totally spoiled.  I supported myself when I needed to and until I became disabled and unable to work.  

I was thrilled by my learning at Pitt and wanted to learn more. This desire to excel led me to a strong grade performance.  I worked hard and I earned all As during my graduate school studies. They were all solid As except for one A- from one of my mentor Paul Bové which I thought was fair.  He always demanded the best from me.

Now, I look back on my jobs before university. I see their value and I wonder if I made the right move committing my life, to the exclusion of family and friends, to dedicated systematic scholarship.  I might have been more happy cooking in a professional kitchen.  Maybe I would have led a better life in a kitchen, a job where I could forget my work after my labor.  I have osteoporosis now, and it is frightening to learn that I probably can’t support myself with my manpower alone any more.

A philosophical education penetrated my whole life, until I sought relief only in sleep.  I could not leave my labor at work and be free, but I had to read, and later construct and manage a class, in my time at home in my apartment.  The bureaucratic aspects of teaching I took recorded on a page of graph paper.  The collegiality of the department encouraged me.  I found intellectual work and teaching to be welcome challenges.  Both relieved my natural curiosity and encouraged me to expand my fields of study. By the end of the day, I would crash into sleep mentally and physically exhausted.

Chapter 9 

A class I recall well was called Introduction to Modern Critical Practice.  This class was a broad introduction to the history of literary criticism.  

The first semester of this class was taught by Professor Landy whose book Fascism and Film critiqued the representation of the fascist mindset in pre-War Italian film.  This class was held at a bar and restaurant a short walk from the Cathedral of Learning which was the Gothic sky scraper where I learned and taught.  The bar in whose back room we met was called Hemingway’s.  We drank beer, smoked cigarettes, and discussed literature and literary theory while in class there.  

During the second semester of my first year, Introduction to Modern Critical Practice was taught on the fifth floor of the Cathedral of Learning.  It was taught by Professor Paul A. Bové and it was as formal as the first semester had been casual.  I knew at the time that Bové had written Intellectuals in Power.  The irony of this title appealed to me so I began studying it on my own.  In the Bové model, intellectuals are both subject and object.  Intellectuals hold the power to express themselves critically.  Within the disciplinary borders of their departments and committees, they retain agency. These are some of the limits of the tenured academic.

Intellectuals are also in power. But did they maintain independent agency because they were caught up in a series of professional schemata and so governed and contained by a web of disciplinary power? The book Intellectuals in Power, was still a little much for me, at the time, but I read it doggedly, as one must do when one is new to a field of knowledge, and I learned as I went.

Chapter 10 

I recall it was in this first year that I undertook a sustained study of Shakespeare.  At Duke, we were required to take either Chaucer, Milton, or Shakespeare. I had studied Chaucer and thank him for developing my sense of humor.  Later, in graduate school, I studied with Professor Novy, whose book on feminist readings of William Shakespeare I had read during the summer before I matriculated at Pitt.  

In her class, I recall Henry IV and Shakespeare's exploration of the warrior-prince, which I would later contextualize with Don Quixote. We also read Hamlet, Lear, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, and many more.

Book Fifteen 

Chapter 1 

I hadn’t liked the winter cold of my Shadyside efficiency so in my second year in Pittsburgh, I moved to a third floor one-bedroom walkup apartment in the neighborhood of Bloomfield.  This was my best apartment in Pittsburgh.  It was warm in the winter.  While it was a bit farther from the university than the Shadyside efficiency, I didn’t mind the walk. 

I do recall one winter blizzard when I made it to school with difficulty.  I remember vividly, slipping and falling, and catching myself with one gloved hand on a chain link fence.  What if I had split my skull open on the sidewalk and froze to death?  I was a little overawed with the weather that day, but made it to class along with a small contingent of students from the freshman towers down the street from the Cathedral of Learning.  I don’t think the university ever closed for winter weather when I was there though Pittsburgh is known for its lake-effect snow and frigid winters.  Hence the appeal of the warm pub.

Bloomfield was traditionally an ethnically Italian neighborhood.  I recall the women in their bay windows making pasta by hand, the barbers who cut hair according to drawings of men’s hairstyles on the walls, and the restaurants known for making their food from traditional Italian family recipes.Chapter 2 

I equipped my new Bloomfield apartment with furniture from IKEA.  This was within a graduate student’s budget and I got comfortable.  I bought a Poäng armchair from IKEA and I used this chair for marathon reading sessions and for marathon film watching events.  I had narrowed my dissertation to Hollywood films of the 1960s.  I was seeking out representations of the counterculture in 60s Hollywood movies.  I was also trying to trace the representation of the backlash against the 60s as it was represented in the Hollywood films of the period.

My life in Bloomfield, though I had a small party or two, was mostly as insular as it had been in Shadyside.  In both apartments I had been known for my insularity.  I knew I had to read to play catch up and I did.  

Now I am a bit of a recluse.  I rarely leave the house and I don’t go out after dark.  I am an early bird and usually awaken before dawn to read, write, and revise.

In Bloomfield, I encountered vice in the form of Lou Reed. His sensitivity to the death trip of addiction affected me, someone who had smoked the entirety of his adult years.  

While I am addicted to caffeine and nicotine, two legal American vices, I am wary of hard drugs. They have lost their allure. Thanks to Young’s influence, I shied away from intravenous drug use. Nonetheless, I began to romanticize heroin.  For a time Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground seduced me.  Well,  I took a sniff and later a pill from a dealer. This was enough to cause me to OD.  I experienced death.  My heart slowed and stopped.  I felt my awareness recede and, in panic and terror, disappear completely.  Don’t try heroin.  It killed me, yet I somehow live. 

I thought by avoiding intravenous heroin use, it’s use would be benign.  Well, a snort and a pill were enough to kill me off, as was perhaps my dealer’s intent, but not kill me permanently.  Still I knew the panic and terror of death.  I had experienced true human finitude.  I was locked in my body, immobilized by the heroin, and I felt myself slowly die.  Never try heroin.  You may not be as lucky as me.

Chapter 3 

It was in 1992 that I began teaching.  The late David Bartholomae was chair of the department at the time. Barthomae was an expert in composition studies: the art of teaching people how to write.  He wrote an influential essay titled “Inventing the university” in which he argued that the acquisition of academic discourse was essential for first year students in a university and that this academic discourse could best be taught by teaching people how to write and articulate their thoughts to their new community (David Bartholomae, Wikipedia).  

He argued that writing “built bridges” between the writer and his or her audience.  In this, he was very Christian for does not Paul write the purpose of faith is to “build up” oneself and other people.  For me, Pittsburgh was a city of bridges.

We new graduate students used the myriad of texts (plays, essays, prose) in Petrosky and Bartholomae’s Ways of Reading for our students to write on.  Ways of Reading contained a wide variety of texts so we were given flexibility in the formation of the backbone of our respective classes.  

All new graduate students were trained to teach writing by the same method.  I found it both effective for my students and useful for the development of my own writing because I would later evolve my creative writing separate from the university.  The main concept of this method of teaching composition was revision.  

In our classes, we would discuss a text.  Then the students would write about the text in a three to five page paper.  I would grade their papers and give them some clues about how to develop, extend, and articulate their ideas in their revision.  I would then return these marked pages to my students and choose as representative a student paper to talk about in class.  

I would next make 22 mimeographs of the representative paper before class began.  We graduate students used mimeograph machines in our teaching while the higher ranking professors used the copying machine.  When we had finished discussing the representative paper, I would send the students home to revise their own papers.  This was the method.

I taught for many years at Pitt. The work was demanding, but I enjoyed my new found responsibility and became intuitively instructive, quick on my feet, and mentally and rhetorically agile.

I enjoyed teaching, knew everyone’s name in my classes, and during the spring semester we would all look forward to class outside on the lawn.  I was known for doing a thorough job and never being late.  I was also known for being a disciplinarian.  I recorded the attendance and individual progress of my students on graph paper, and sometimes D’ed people who skipped class and didn’t participate in classroom discussion.  These were rare, but I became known, I learned later, as “Sergeant Slaughter.”. I preferred “The Preacher” which was another of my nicknames at the time.  I was also called “Bullethead” and “The Fonz.” All of this was a step up from “Beaker” or “Torso.”

I taught exclusively from Ways of Reading except for one class when I was allowed carte blanche.  In that class, I taught three works of philosophy and two novels.  One of the novels, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), was from a female, colored, Caribbean author.  The novel showed the ways in which the traditional island’s self-sufficient economy had been penetrated by the sugar and  salt cod industries to the detriment of the indigenous population.  This was a process of neocolonial re enslavement.

I also taught Don Delillo’s White Noise.  I hope my class enjoyed the satiric humor of this novel as well as its profound depth.  The protagonist in the novel is a leading figure in the field of Hitler studies.  The university is well known for its uniform hostility to fascism and this professor of Hitler studies shared this perspective on World War Two.  The twist comes when we see the satire of the novel for aren’t disciplinary matrixes and the grading schemes of the modern university a little fascist themselves?  How do we teach anti-fascism in an environment limited by discipline?

In this class I also taught three philosophical texts.  I taught critically Marx’s The German Ideology, Freud’s Dora case, and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex.  These texts provoked lively conversation and debate.

I guess America isn’t free anymore, for I believe that the thoughtful and worthwhile contents of this class got me targeted by the politicians who later ran me out of the university.  Censorship is counter to the American Way and should not be tolerated in America’s universities.  It’s no wonder that fully half the population, according to a recent study, wants to expatriate, disgusted as they are by America’s perverted politicians, the relatively high American tax rate, the vapid quality of its entertainments, and the added cost of doing business in America due to endemic corruption. 

When I returned to Bloomfield from teaching school, I would enjoy one beer at home in my apartment.  I drank beer that I got from the beer dispensary near the food coop.  I believe the brand was Koch’s and the brew offered a sub ten dollar case of twenty ounce glass bottles.  

Living on a graduate student’s budget, I economized on beer and cigarettes.  I began to roll my own cigarettes in a French Rizla rolling box, with American Spirit bulk tobacco, to economize, yes, and to become more mindful of my smoking.  

I earned an $11,000 annual income from the university as a Teaching Assistant for an 80 hour work week. The Rizla rolling box was curved on one side to fit neatly in the rear pocket of my Levi’s 501 jeans. I ordered pouches of American Spirit tobacco by the dozen, filters by the thousand count, and Rizla papers in bulk to limit the impact of smoking cigarettes on my budget.

When I was in Pittsburgh, I joined a food coop.  This coop was a medium drive away through East Liberty.  In fact, the road passed through a tunnel in an East Liberty apartment building.  On the other side, it was a straight shot to the coop.  This food coop was in a building that also contained a skateboarding half pipe and a rock climbing wall.

The coop had a restaurant that served health food.  It had a bulk section which I patronized for granola and crunchy peanut butter.  I would also purchase miso, tofu, and seaweed at the coop for a nutritious soup.

There was a social side of the coop that I rarely interacted with.  I usually came alone and left alone.  I had become so introverted that I perceived the true community of this coop as an alien bystander.  Still, I felt comfortable there even though I was not living in the immediate neighborhood.  The coop was a good environment. It was warm there in the winter, and I enjoyed this comfortably wholesome environment year round. It was at this time that I began buying organic fruits and vegetables for juicing, nutrition, and health.

Chapter 4

While I read Marxist aesthetics and critical theory, I never answered yes to the naive question “are you a communist?” although I was frequently asked. I would always demure, preferring a label, though I didn’t like crude labels at all, like Marxian.  The difference is this: a Marxian historian recognizes the centrality of class struggle in the progress of history.  This is a common notion in American sociology departments. In my reading, this point of view represented part of my approach to literary texts. To me the centrality of class struggle was an obvious fact, though frequently obscured by bad faith and dogmatic ideology. Class conflict is a fundamental fact of capitalism though it is frequently hidden by the over production of sympathetic texts, dreck, and other ideological formations.  Though I romanticized the American reds of the thirties and forties and their cultural productions, I was too alarmed by communism in state form to consider it desirable. I also could not imagine what a western communism would look like though Bernie Sanders gives us some ideas. I was enthusiastic about his later 2016 campaign. He seemed to represent what I had been learning and I liked his retention of the loaded term “solidarity.” While I didn’t think much of capitalism at the time, communism, when realized in the state form, I identified with state terror and dictatorship.

To me, Marxian historiography was but one tool in my critical methodological tool box. Tools like: feminism, psychology, structuralism, post-structuralist deconstruction, linguistics, narratology, semiotics, literary cartography, formalism, the new criticism, queer theory, metaphysics, critical philosophy from the pre-Socratics to Adorno, ideological critique, cultural history, existentialism, hermeneutics, reception theory, anthropology, reader response theory, cognitive literary scholarship, the history and theory of the novel, and so on, all are tools in my critical toolbox. They are the tools of the trade for the person of letters. In my familiarity with these tools of the trade, I can be said to be polyvalent.

I am less an ideologue than a critic. I critique dogma, doctrinaire Marxism included, with the tools of literary study. Because these tools are the result of extensive systematic reading and guided research, they are hard won.

Book Sixteen

Chapter 1

I had received my terminal MA, and gained admittance to the PhD program.  I remained at Pitt after I earned my Master’s degree.  I taught, attended class, and studied. The project for my dissertation was to be Hollywood film in the 1960s.  I sought to interpret the representations of dissent in the counterculture in 60s Hollywood movies.  I also hoped to measure the conservative reaction to the sixties as it was displayed in film. This project was Easy Rider writ large.

Chapter 2 

It was at this time that the hard drive on my computer, an SE/30, began to fill.  Essays for class, notes on films, correspondence, personal reflections, all of these texts started to fill up my computer.  This SE/30 later suffered a hard drive failure and I had to throw it out with all the data it contained.  While I consider everything on the SE/30 to be unpublished juvenilia, there are times when I wish I could look back at it for the sake of sentimental recollection.  Now, I backup online, but then, I lost all my textual memories from 1990 to 1997.

Chapter 3

 It was in a film class with Professor Landy that I started to read The Frankfurt School.  We had covered some of these writers in Modern Critical Practice, but I explored The Dialectic of Enlightenment in Professor Landy’s class.  We also read Walter Benjamin.  I have perceived the world in the rather dismal view of the Frankfurt School ever since though I break with Adorno on jazz which I find endlessly intriguing.  These European intellectuals of Frankfurt, long a Jewish enclave and the original city of the Rothchilds, immigrated to America in the 1940s to evade Nazi state terror and censorship in their own country. I continued on in this vein in a class on Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School in the sociology department.

Chapter 4 

It was around this time that I took a class with Professor Landy’s colleague, the film critic Dana Polan, on the topic of that popular and academic intellectual, that Frenchman, Roland Barthes.  This seminar demanded comprehensive reading in the wildly prolific Barthes. There was a writing requirement for every class. This led to engaged seminar discussion.

I hesitate to select a quotation to illuminate Roland Barthes, but his essay on the “ambiguity” of the myth of wine to the French citizen, is both very French, for the French are a nation of wine drinkers and king slayers, and very radical. The etymology of the word “radical” evolved as follows.

The figurative meaning "going to the origin, essential" is from 1650s. The political sense of "reformist" is by 1817, of the extreme section of the British Liberal party (radical reform had been a current phrase since 1786), via the notion of "change from the roots" (see radical (n.)). The meaning "unconventional" is from 1921. U.S. youth slang use is from 1983, from 1970s surfer slang meaning "at the limits of control."

This radicality is a goal of my writing. It is about dissent, it thematizes it, but it is not itself subversive or treasonous. It merely seeks to raise to the level of perception that which has been obscured by soil (following the “change from the roots” metaphor), doctrinaire ideology, or cant. In my writing, I try to “go to the origin,” to reveal that which is “essential.” I hope I pursue my writing in an idiosyncratic, unacademic, and “unconventional” way. I hope my writing is interesting, incisive, and sparks debate.

Certainly my approach is multifaceted. I am less an ideologue than someone who seeks to critique the normative ideological forms, Barthes’ “myths,” that limit the perception of both the literary and the everyday. I am not a communist, but a writer who, like Barthes, deploys Marxist terms to disrupt the self-evidence of myth, to reveal myth’s ideological function, and to understand that which myth and ideology obscure.

Roland Barthes deploys Marxist terms like “alienation,” “dispossession,” and “expropriation,” in his elaborations about the importance of wine to the French. This promotion of wine to the status of myth, he carefully critiques in his essay “Wine and Milk.”

His final conclusions are not narrowly ideological though, but disruptive. After an analysis of the obfuscation of wine’s colonial origin in the Algerian exploitation of the wine vines there, he disrupts the myth of the egalitarian tradition of the French wine drinking fraternity through the “innocent” communal consumption of wine, by locating wine’s (partial) origin in French Algerian imperialism.

Barthes’ conclusions, finally, do not seek to promote a conversion to political communism. They do use Marxist terms to explain myth, but even these terms only conclude with “ambiguity.” Ambiguity, a static world of conformity, does not spare communism from its critique. Marxist literary theory, that succession of books and essays, exhibits continuous and rigorous self critique. This pursuit of ambiguity is the result of the critique of all static forms of myth or ideology. The pursuit of ambiguity isn’t communistic, but anti-doctrinaire and ever adapting. Barthes writes on the subject of the “ambiguity” of wine:

For it is true that [French] wine is a good and fine substance, but it is no less true that it’s production is deeply involved in French capitalism, whether it is that of the private distillers, or that of the big settlers in Algeria who impose on the Muslims [who, of course, don’t consume alcohol at all], on the very land of which they have been dispossessed, a crop of which they have no need, while they lack even bread. There are thus many engaging myths which are however not innocent. And the characteristic of our current alienation is that wine cannot be an unalloyed and blissful substance, except if we wrongly forget that it is also the product of an expropriation.

Barthes’ does not seek to simplify, but to complicate. He sees myth as a simplification (French cafe and bistro fraternity taken with wine), and seeks to illuminate and complicate that which mythology and ideology obscure (French wines colonial origin in imperialist and exploitative Algeria).

What I recall most about this class on Barthes was when I learned of Barthes’ tragic demise.  Leaving a meeting with the French head of state, he was run over by a laundry truck.  Was this an accident or a hit?  There are real consequences, no more so than today, for reporters, authors, and intellectuals who speak truth to power.  Salman Rushdie was nearly killed by an assailant wielding a knife simply for being a wildly creative and rigorous free thinker. The recent increase in femicides, and attacks on journalists of both genders, are very real and lethal contemporary concerns.

Chapter 5 

I left my project on Hollywood films in the 1960s behind when I left the university.  I may write it yet.  A Hollywood focus seems to me to be too limited now.  I am considering a book about global film in the 1960s–everything from the Japanese samurai films (in which California cool is prefigured), to the Italian luxe life films, from spaghetti western to third world film. Following André Bazin, I will study the New Wave of the French cinema too.

Book Seventeen 

Chapter 1

I was cold, miserable, exhausted, and isolated so I took a leave of absence.  I moved into an apartment in East Walnut Hills, Cincinnati and began to write Konflagrations. This postmodern retelling of the Faust myth, I revised over the years. I didn’t become satisfied with this work for some time, and would not publish it until 2023, though I had begun it in 1994. In this novel, I situated Urian Blitzblaum as the ensnaring devil.

There was crack cocaine in my new neighborhood in Cincinnati so I never felt safe there. I also never felt any urge to try crack which I heard was cheap, highly addictive, and its come down nasty.  I bought a .45 Derringer for home defense there. This weapon did nothing but compromise me. In the end, I wanted to use it for suicide, Many foolish young men do. Suicide by self inflicted gunshot is rarely reported in the local television news though it is common. I was glad when I threw this deadly little gun away in a trash can. It would torment my mental health no more.

I began Konflagrations in this confusing, predominately African American, neighborhood. I knew, by the time I left, that I wanted to write. I also knew that I didn't want to be a super or a landlord. 

Chapter 2 

Konflagrations was initiated in East Walnut Hills in 1995, though I did not publish it as Konflagrations Revised until January 2023.  I began Konflagrations as a young man, if relatively well informed, in my twenties.  When I later revised it for publication, I was in my 50s.  By then, I was a seasoned and, I hope, responsible writer.  

I had seen Thelma and Louise, and maybe that was what had inspired Zeverin and Urian.  I was then reading in the Americans Poe and Twain.  Because of these influences, woman-centric, gothic, and satirical, I felt that nothing was off limits.

Chapter 3 

It was at this time that I began to visit Mt. Adams.  This hilltop entertainment zone had many bars, coffee shops, and restaurants.  I could not help but contrast my social life there with my solitary life in depressed, crack-riven, though since markedly improved, East Walnut Hills. I revived an old relationship at this time. We got along well together and I hope I helped her through a rough patch.

Book Eighteen

Chapter 1

I soured of East Walnut Hills. The apartment building had roaches. It was called the roach hotel. In Pittsburgh, the severe winter keeps them at bay, but in Cincinnati they thrive. I returned to a new apartment in Bloomfield, Pittsburgh.  At this time, I was wildly romantic and naive.  I think I was in love with the idea of romantic love.  I thought my role should be one of devotion.  

I began to think about poetry, and how it was coded and obviously translatable once you figured out the poems muse and code.  I was finally learning to read between the lines.  While poetry was coded, prose was self-conscious, mediated and intertextual.  Its  authenticity, confidence, and authority, I began to seek in my own writing. I began to develop what is called “a voice.”

Here too, I would experience the identity of love and loss.  After a breakup, I was through with it all and irretrievably gone. I wanted to put a bullet through my heart and then through my head at this juncture.  Love, for me, became identical with suicide. I would never love again.

Isn’t love child’s play,, something based in adolescent lust, sustained and molded by religion, and exploited by popular culture, to get boys and girls to breed and reproduce. I won’t seek love anymore. Nor will I seek to breed and reproduce. My books are my only offspring. I am a celibate of over twenty years. That’s quite a streak. I haven’t had sexual intercourse with a woman, and would never consider sex with a man, in over twenty years.

I live like a monk with the study of my books, and my writing, (with beer, medical marijuana, tobacco, and coffee my only indulgences). I have been burned by love and friendship so I avoid both. I exist in a maelstrom of intrigue, but my libido is very low and I like it that way. I have always been shy and now I cultivate an introspective reserve. I lead a solitary life, and I don’t seek any permanent partner.

Book Nineteen

Chapter 1

In Cincinnati, I worked for one day at a factory cutting boards to a certain length to establish the “norm,” before I left to write a novel.  I moved from my parent’s house, to an apartment in the Gaslamp district on Ludlow Avenue–a major thoroughfare in the university district of Clifton.  There I continued work on Konflagrations.

I soon fell into a routine.  I would start my days at Sitwell’s, a coffee house, at the time, in the basement of the apartment building in which I lived.  This space had good coffee and I particularly liked their spinach Spanakopitas.

I began every night after dinner at the bar and restaurant Arlin’s near the firehouse at the intersection of Clifton and Ludlow.  I would drink my fill, sometimes playing pool in the side room, or watching sports in the easy ambiance of the main barroom.  Arlin’s also has a stage in their walled backyard that showcases local talent. I would end nearly every night alone at the Skyline chili parlor across the street from Arlin’s with a three way and two chili cheese sandwiches. I had developed a barroom drinking habit, and this would not serve me well when I returned to Pittsburgh to study.

In 1997, I went back to Pitt and back to the PhD program.  I also returned to teaching.  I had moved to Pittsburgh’s Southside and usually took the bus up the steep hill to campus.  I soon became dismal and abject.  While I figured I was working 100 hour work weeks, teaching and study included, I was just treading water.  

I would knock off work every night at 11:00 and head for the bars which are common in the Southside’s entertainment district.  I newly had some regular money from home and I was starting to drink and eat that check.  I drank for two, in the Pittsburgh tradition, every round, and closed the bars out every night. I was a steady regular patron, never violent, and went home when the bars closed.

I usually closed out the night at D’s with all of the local Southsiders.  I usually drank Rolling Rock beer and Jameson whiskey alone, as was my habit at the time, and I made a few friends. All like D’s regulation pool tables, professional grade ping pong tables, jukeboxes, and reasonably priced drinks.  I had some bar friends with whom I habitually drank and I lost track of my university friends. I went native, so to speak, for I was drinking in the double round tradition I thought typical of the Pittsburgh mill worker, for wasn’t I working too? Well, nothing like they had to do. I romanticized the Pittsburgh mill workers. People in the far away.university began to refer to me, following the movie Apocalypse Now, as “Kurtz.”

Chapter 2 

In the Southside, it was called the loop, the walk down one side of Carson Street and then back up the other.  I would start some days at the Beehive Coffee Shop.  I began to play Medieval Madness, a pinball table there, and got good enough to win a free game once in a while.  During lunch, I would grade papers and drink coffee at one of the Southside’s cafes.  My teaching style had become Socratic.  I responded to my students texts, in my written recommendations, mostly with Socratic questions to extend and expand their thinking.. I hoped this would help them develop their first round of papers to their polished and expanded revisions.  I think this was effective.

Every night I closed the night at D’s.  I would drink there from 11:00 to 2:00 am, grab a kebab on the short walk home, and read the New York Times until I felt sleepy.  While I flirted with alcoholism, I never drank in the mornings, so I never became an alcoholic. Still, I was drinking for two every round and I liked to get loaded.

The comfort of the barroom soon yielded to disintegration.  While I had maintained my pace, teaching and taking seminars during the first semester, I broke down at the start of my second semester, quit the university, and returned to my parents house in Cincinnati, Ohio for some much needed rest.  

Some might say I drank myself out of a job.  Maybe it helped me survive, but from a position of some sobriety and in the long term view, all that drinking, which began and became normalized for me on Ludlow in Cincinnati, didn’t do me any good. 

There were many reasons why I failed there. Teaching Marx had put a target on my back and the Pennsylvanian conservatives were only too happy when I quit. Tom Ridge, a Republican, was the governor of Pennsylvania when I quit in 1998.  Like Reagan, he may have been another Republican nemesis. I left, or was forced out, in 1998.  I really don’t know. I didn’t follow the televised news cycle of the day and missed the propaganda’s spin.  I didn’t watch television news in graduate school. While Democracy Now! is compelling, I avoid television with the exception of some PBS programs like Frontline. At present I watch no television, not even YouTube which I can screen on my video monitor. They’re hit city and they are watching me.

I was at home when the planes filled with Saudi militants hit the World Trade Center.  I reacted with fear and dismay.  At the time, a grand gesture seemed called for so I liquidated my account and went to the Harley Davidson dealership on Tennessee Avenue in Norwood.  When I found that the motorcycle I wanted was beyond my means, I returned home nonplussed.  

Later, president George W. Bush named Ridge to the first directorship of the Office of Homeland Security in 2001.  Was this his reward for neutralizing me? This organization had laudable goals to curtail terrorism, but I didn’t trust Ridge for the job.  Now, he’s out of politics and is a board member on many corporate boards for which I am sure he is richly rewarded.  It’s quite a change from his story of working.his way through Harvard. I don’t know whether to be disgusted or impressed by this specimen of American politics.

Book Twenty 

Chapter 1 

In 1999, I moved to Portland, Oregon.  This was the time and place when I began to hear voices in my head. I was reading Finnegan’s Wake at this time and it accompanied my descent into mental illness.  I was undiagnosed and unmedicated in Portland, and it wasn’t until the year 2000, that I was diagnosed with the chronic mental illness paranoid schizophrenia. It was not until 2001 that I was picked up by Social Security and legally designated disabled.

Here too, I fell into a routine.  I would spend my evenings in a coffee shop, and then cross the street to Club 21.  There I would drink for two, in typical Pittsburgh tradition, self medicating with strong drink in a quiet barroom of which I was a regular misfit.

My favorite bar downtown was Shanghai and I would sometimes eat and drink there.  Portland was a foodie’s paradise.

Chapter 2

It was in Portland that I began to take long rambles through the city. Portland, Oregon was not the ruined battleground that it is today. I walked alone through a well tended jewel of a city.

I joined a food coop when I was in Portland. I even applied for work there, as the web site I had developed wasn’t panning out, but I soon left Portland behind.

Chapter 3 

I was reading Finnegan’s Wake at the time, and it contributed to my sense of confusion.  I still couldn’t translate coded prose well, but I was learning. I set down Finnegan’s Wake and did not pick up another book until Boulder, Colorado, where I began to read Jack London in the library.

Chapter 4 

One bad night in Portland, I felt my head transfixed by needles.  I thought I must look like Hellraiser, though I wouldn’t see the film until later. I could perceive no one in my apartment, yet I could feel needles piercing my brain.  I think I experienced brain damage in Portland, and for a long while, I wasn’t myself. 

The website of wooden products from my father’s factory that I designed was not patronized. I knew next to nothing about internet technology and it’s inventory was limited.  I acquiesced to failure, and planned to leave with nothing more than the backpack that I had come with, on New Year's Day 2000.  I had arranged to reduce the lease to six months. I held on to the end.

The lines, “You lock the door/And throw away the key/There's someone in my head but it's not me,” have been my reality since Portland. I understand this reality in a dreadful way and much more acutely than I had received The Dark Side of the Moon as a teenager. I usually have two or three voices in my head, and I become easily distracted from real world conversation. These voices were active in my mind from when I woke to when I fell asleep. It must seem very strange, but this is my reality. I’m not as socially outgoing as I used to be. When you have two or three naysaying voices in your head, constantly yammering at you like sadistic jackasses, you don’t want to pursue additional conversation. I still, in 2023, suffer from these naysaying voices. They have stupefyingly prattled in my head since 1999.

Chapter 5

It was while I was waiting for my lease to expire in Portland when I began to write to lawyers and law firms, both national and international. I emailed them about how I believed I was being tortured. I eventually emailed nearly 700 of these letters to alert the law. Did they get through? I still don’t know. I am not dead yet. Maybe they got through.Book Twenty One 

Book Twenty One

Chapter 1 

It was after I left Portland that, like many of the mentally ill, I experienced a time of homelessness.  I traveled to Denver, Colorado where I stayed at the mission for a time.  This was in the year 2000 and their operation was a little different than it is today.  They would get us up early, feed us a light meal, and send us off into the world.  Those who could work, mostly undocumented migrant laborers, would go to a spot where work was contracted.  They would get in the back of the pickups that waited for them there for day labor. Those of us who couldn’t work, and I was an unmedicated wreck at the time, would hang out in the bus station until the mission opened again for the big breakfast.  

Sometimes, I would venture out into the empty predawn city before the big breakfast. I recall one morning with the temperature around 20 degrees Fahrenheit when I climbed the three steps down into an empty rectangular cement city park. I extracted my thermal sleeping mat and mummy bag from my pack. I inflated the Therm-a-rest and got into the mummy bag. There, alone, three steps down from the surface of the city, I felt the wind flowing past above me and the earth buoying me up and grounding me. I wondered, have I reached a new low. But, I just laughed. I thought, there must be an I Ching hexagram here somewhere. I was comfortable, even warm, in my contoured mummy sleeping bag, a warm vessel in the void, and I had a meal to look forward to.

Then we would eat and be sent off into the world again.  Somewhere here, I got ill with the flu and went to the Stout Street Free Clinic for some medical care.  I received enough pills to break the illness and a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia there.  This was in the year 2000. It wasn’t until 2002 that I was connected with Social Security. I have been receiving partial disability pay ever since.  While I can be deliberately cantankerous, combative, and contrarian in my writing, I see myself as a Social Security author–a diplomat of the liberal state.

But at the time, I was mending, and somehow moved up to Boulder, Colorado’s Homeless Shelter where I got some much needed rest.  They would get us up early, and we would have a good breakfast before we were moved in a van down the hill to downtown Boulder.  I spent my mornings at the Peace Park until the library opened.  There, I would read Jack London.  I had it good in Boulder, even managed to gain some weight, and probably should have stayed.  But the naysaying voices in my head controlled me, and when they instructed me to move to Burlington, Vermont, compliantly I did.

Chapter 2

 I took a bus ride from Denver, Colorado to Burlington, Vermont.  That was a lengthy ride.  In Burlington, in the early spring, I soon fell in with the Committee on Temporary Shelter (COTS).  I stayed at the Committee’s shelter.  They had a bunk open.  I spent the night with them and then began the Burlington walk. 

Book Twenty Two

Chapter 1 

I stayed several months in Burlington.  I wrote to my mother on Mother’s Day to let her know where I was. Burlington probably felt that I had some family issues to work through. I eventually took a bus back to my parent’s home in Cincinnati. I have never owned a home of my own.

Chapter 2 

It was while I was at home that I began to write an epistolary novel with a friend.  This was an experiment in prose, the novel form in English was originally pursued in an exchange of letters, and we had fun with it.  I lost this entertaining document when the hard drive of my SE/30 crashed.

Chapter 3 

While I was home, I read the volumes of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.  In this book I recognized some of my own critical education. Its intellectual men and artistic women characters matured and they embraced new intellectual challenges and trends in an ever widening gyre of knowledge. This series of books seemed to sum up some of my own critical developments and when I finished reading the series, I didn’t read anything for some time. Importantly, I resolved not to follow the book’s protagonist, who embraced every trend, only to die of a heart attack pursuing his new hobby running. I had pursued a gradual increase in my field of knowledge, but I was wary of trends and sought to achieve an organic expression of my community. I don’t think I did, for I was solitary and unfortunately not communitarian at all in my social immaturity, but I read Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, on Italian theater, for class, and became aware of his distinctions between the emergent and the residual, the hegemonic and the counter hegemonic, and the organic and inorganic.

Book Twenty Three

Chapter 1  

During this time in my life, newly at home again and fresh from homelessness, I was convalescent. I began to play video games of strategic precision. Video games demand a life of the mind.  It is not the life of the mind of scholarship, but it is satisfying in its own way.  Strategy games can train the mind of the youthful and old alike.

While I still played war games, I had taken over the entire sandbox world through military conquest in Sid Meier’s Civilization, I didn’t perceive them as violent or anti-Buddhist. I was more interested in strategic interplay. Sid Meier’s games are more complicated than chess.

Chapter 2

 After some time at home, I began to run away. I didn’t feel comfortable at home anymore. The women who I thought I had uncomplicatedly loved during my life, took bribes to blackmail my reputation. While my life is full of intrigue it is slander to call me a rapist, a racist, or a terrorist. I am simply a writer in search of a readership. I have been working hard on my writing for three years now, though it was always part of my education. But at the time, I fled to Durham, Boulder, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Denver. I always returned to my parent’s home in Cincinnati.

As a result of these travels, I began to get in debt. I have learned something, don’t travel when you are in debt. 

Chapter 3 

Durham, North Carolina was the first city to which I fled.  I spent one night in the shelter in which I had volunteered as a liberal Duke student, before I took a bus to San Francisco.  There I stayed in a hostel in North Beach that catered to transients.  I ate lo mein from a restaurant  in ChinaTown.  I crossed Kerouac's street between North Beach and ChinaTown daily to get to the lo mein restaurant.

I thought I was living the Beat life.  I had traveled across the country with nothing more than I could carry in my old, external frame, US made, Jansport scout backpack.  I was seeking Zen inspiration and I was becoming more aware of the void that hovered around my lone monad.

I was leading the ambulatory, celibate, contemplative life of a Buddhist itinerant.  Buddhism appealed to me because of its recognition of the suffering brought about by inescapable finitude and impermanence and undesirable lust and desire.

Chapter 4

Later, I took a flight for Boulder, CO only to return the very next day when I discovered their new homeless shelter was full. I have written about this experience elsewhere, in fictional form, so I won’t belabor it here.

Chapter 5 

Later, I traveled to LA and stayed, as usual, at the Santa Monica AYH hostel.  One night, I slept at a bus stop with some dude in a wheelchair.  The night was balmy and I was too comfortable to return to the hostel.  I soon traveled home again.

Chapter 6

One time, I returned to the mission in Denver. They had changed the way they did things. We were fed three times a day at the mission, then they bussed us out to factory space that had been converted to house the homeless at night.

I stayed for some time, but my cell phone was stolen and I came down with a nasty case of Bronchitis. I returned to Cincinnati where I had to remain in a hospital, Bethesda North which has always served my complicated medical needs capably, for five days of immobility and oxygen, before I was released back home again.

Chapter 7 

Finally, I ran away to San Francisco.  I spent a night in the Tenderloin, sleeping in a doorway, before I checked into the Union Square hostel–again running on credit.  I soon moved home again after spending a night in one of their hospitals.

Book Twenty Four

Chapter 1

When I got home, I moved back to the Gaslamp district on Ludlow.   I remember the late summer heat.  The Olympics were on. I watched them in my unairconditioned and sweltering apartment.  I was living like a shut in, and I soon moved back home.

Chapter 2 

I later moved to the city of Milford in the Cincinnati suburbs.  I had some money from home again, and this was to be my retirement.  My only contact with the community was at a local bourbon bar where I habitually drank rounds of Guinness and Jameson.  I was drinking for two again.  This bar had live music on the weekends. I enjoyed the shows. 

Chapter 3 

I put on weight in Milford.  I topped out at nearly 300 pounds.  Now I am 235. For a while, I ate a frozen pizza and a pint of ice cream for dinner every night.  Later, I  shifted to McDonald’s dollar menu. I would eat my fill. This program, the dollar menu, should be encouraged. Even the poor can muster a dollar. McDonald’s provided a useful social service with its dollar menu.

Chapter 4 

At that time, I wasn’t reading or writing.  I experienced a little death of the mind.  I think I was replenishing my spirit.  I met some people I liked, and had a couple of crushes, but my celibacy streak went unchallenged in Milford.

Book Twenty Five

Chapter 1 

I soon returned to my parent’s home in The Village of Indian Hill.  I began playing video games and eventually tried out the Nintendo Switch, the Microsoft Xbox, and the Sony Playstation.

I also began to work out in a series of gyms. I lifted at home and later under the guidance of a personal trainer at one of the local gyms that I patronized.  At one of these gyms, I weight trained.  At another, I swam and enjoyed the steam room, hot tub, and sauna.  I wish I could still swim.  Now, I have severe bone-on-bone arthritis in my shoulders.  I can no longer lift or swim.

Both of my shoulders have been operated on, but there is nothing you can do about arthritis.  I live with chronic arthritic pain.  I can no longer labor in most positions. It's scary when time takes that away from you.  As for my mind, I usually have two or three naysaying voices in my head when I write.  I can still compose, but it is only through revision that I get it right.

Somewhere in here, my back was broken.  I had surgery on my back, by an accomplished neurosurgeon who fused two vertebrae and installed a titanium rod on either side of my spine.  It was a serious surgery.  While I was weak for several months, the long term results were better than expected.

—

On Disability.  Updated 8/20.

Copyright 2024

by

David Santin Kilday

I have been considered Disabled by the Social Security Administration since 2001.  I have been a Medicare/Medicaid patient since then.  My case is a hard one.  I suffer from a well documented chronic medical condition of over 25 years duration.  

I am prescribed 7 pills; I need a monthly injection; I see a doctor every 3 months; I see a psychiatrist every 3 months; I have a case manager, and; I am considered gravely ill.

Because I am too sick to work like a well person, I receive a monthly payment from the Social Security Administration’s Disability program of $1,127.00.  This monthly SSA payment is usually the only income I have to live on.  This payment can be considered a fixed income that usually increases yearly with inflation. 

I paid into the Social Security system like all workers in America do, until I became too ill to work in my early thirties.  As everyone in America should know, in exchange for a comfortable and secure retirement, workers in America pay 6.2% of their paycheck to The Social Security Administration until, traditionally, age 65.  The employer must match the employee, so effectively the worker adds value to his retirement of 12.4% per paycheck.  That way when a worker retires, he can enjoy many happy returns.

The SSA protects the poor, the sick, and the old.  I am amongst the sick.  According to US employment law, employers cannot discriminate against disabled people who are looking for work–any more than an employer can discriminate against a woman for being a woman or a person of color for being a person of color.  The disabled, women, and people of color are all protected by the same employment law.  Sometimes, the Disabled are unemployable.  Sometimes, the Disabled are employable but need to find the right fit.

I have both physical and mental disabilities that justify my support from the Social Security Administration.  Because I am paid by the government, at times I feel like an undercover G-man.

Physically, I am disabled.  I have an arthritic left shoulder.  It causes me intermittent dull pain when I am at rest, sharp pain when I move my arm, and extreme pain when I raise my left hand over my left shoulder.  I am a 56 year old man and time is catching up with me.  I also feel frequent needle pricks and dull and sharp impact and piercing pains.  I have suffered from chronic pain since 1999.  I am frequently exhausted.

Physically, the shoulder injury is the medical reason why doctors have consistently prescribed medical marijuana for me.  I am a card carrying member of the medical marijuana program here in Ohio.  Ohio doctors and lawmakers consider prescribed medical marijuana therapeutic in the treatment of more than 25 medical conditions including epilepsy, PTSD, arthritis, and chronic pain.  My medical diagnosis is chronic pain.

I hold two legal credentials that are necessary for legally purchasing medical marijuana in Ohio: a state of Ohio medical marijuana card (physical and electronic) and a physical state of Ohio driver’s license card.  

There are over one hundred medical marijuana dispensaries (brick and mortar businesses) that sell marijuana and marijuana products (like flower, edibles, and vaporizers) here in Ohio.  I receive an indigency discount of 30% on medical marijuana products purchased at Ohio dispensaries because I am considered low income by the state of Ohio’s Medical Marijuana Registry and because marijuana is considered medicine here in Ohio.  

Marijuana has literally been prescribed to me by a series of different doctors over the years.  My diagnosis has to be confirmed annually during a medical appointment.  The medical appointment is routine because they have the X-rays of my damaged shoulder and because my hard case is long and well documented.  

Marijuana is prescribed for me by a doctor as a medication to relieve pain.  I have tried many pain relievers for my osteoporosis and I find medical marijuana the best pain reliever available.  Medical marijuana is effective for relief from arthritis pain and good for general palliative care.  Most seniors, and I am older, love marijuana once they've tried it.

Medical Marijuana has been available since 2016 in Ohio.  I joined the program in 2019.  Skip ahead to Ohio in the year 2023.  The voters in the November election of 2023 voted by a 57% majority to make the use of marijuana legal recreationally for all adults over 21 in Ohio.  In Ohio, marijuana is now both medicinally and recreationally legal.  I have double coverage as I am covered by medical and recreational marijuana law.

As of August 6, 2024, all adults over 21 can purchase marijuana legally in Ohio.  The marijuana shops have opened their doors to the general public.

Recreational marijuana law has been in effect here in Ohio since December 1st, 2023 (soon after the November election of 2023).  It is legal to grow and smoke marijuana in Ohio right now.  

As of August 6, 2024, nineteen shops are open in Cincinnati that sell marijuana products.  They are in the business of selling legal marijuana.  Anyone over 21 can now purchase and smoke marijuana in Ohio.  Let the good times roll.  Marijuana is not a vice, but a long established medicine, and now, like alcohol after the end of Prohibition, a cherished civil liberty.  Don't confuse alcohol and marijuana though.  The effects of marijuana are more benign.

I recommend everyone try marijuana.  Personally, I now smoke what is called Delta 8 marijuana.  It is derived from hemp, not marijuana, so it is 100% legal even by Federal law.  It is the preferred smoke of G-men and I recommend Top Shelf brand’s White Widow flower to smoke.  It will run you about $50 for 7 grams of flower or bud as it is sometimes known.  It's legal, so indulge and decide for yourself what you think about it.  I

f it's your first time, sit down at home wherever you're most comfortable and put on some mellow music.  You can roll a joint, smoke a pipe, or eat edibles infused with marijuana like chocolate bars and gelatin gummies.  Edibles are the best place to start for those who don't smoke.

When you take marijuana, you will notice an increased sensitivity to sight, sound, and touch, an improvement in your mood, and then a few hours of painless relaxation.

Regionally, it is already legal to smoke marijuana recreationally in Michigan and Illinois.  Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Indiana, the nation, get on board!

To an extent, the nation already has adopted legally consumed marijuana, state by state, as legal conduct.  Marijuana is legal medicinally in 38 states, the District of Columbia, and 3 territories.  Marijuana is legal recreationally in 24 states and The District of Columbia (Google Gemini).  Is it time for legal marijuana nationally, as it is in all Canada now from sea to shining sea?

In addition to my physical disabilities, I am, primarily, mentally disabled.  This is my Disability.  I suffer from a medically diagnosed mental disorder.  I hear voices in my head.  Litiginously, this is called mental torture.  Medically, it is called Schizophrenia.  The street calls it the jaw.  

For 25 years, I heard only hostile voices in my head.  This was agonizing.  For several months now, I have heard some friendlies too.  This frequent verbal mental barrage sometimes makes real verbal communication difficult.  It is difficult for me to communicate with somebody, especially through real talk, when I also have a voice, usually at least three, in my brain mentally torturing me at the same time.  

You may well know this, since my mental disorder is common to 0.5% percent of the population and indirectly affects many more people.

—

In Defence of the Social Security Administration. Updated 8/19.

Copyright 2024 

by 

David Santin Kilday

Social Security gets a bad rap.  This is the data.  In 2023, $1.4 trillion was spent on Social Security Administration (SSA) programs.  As a wedge in the pie of the total federal budget, this accounted for 21% of the entire budget pie chart.  Workers pay in 6.2 % of their paycheck each payday for a comfortable retirement.  In 2024, $1.12 trillion is budgeted for the SSA.  For politicians, this is a chunk of change they hope to plunder.  To put the trillion dollar budget of the SSA in perspective, the military gets at least a trillion dollars a year too.  

Presently, there are 49.1 million retired US citizens who depend on the SSA for their monthly retirement income.  

In my view, the New Deal, and all the programs it engendered, have little to do with Communism, like the Republicans sometimes desperately maintain.  The New Deal and programs it engendered like Social Security and the Tennessee Valley Authority allow a capitalist juggernaut like the USA to thrive for all its citizens: poor, sick, and old alike.

Remember, it was when a spoiled prince first saw poverty, disease, and a dead body, that he resolved to leave his family's castle behind, to go out alone and penniless into the world on a philosophical and spiritual quest to relieve human suffering.  Through that life-long quest, that spoiled human prince became the Buddha.  Aren't saints to be found among the wretched of the earth and isn't it hard to be a saint in the city?

In addition to retirement, the SSA funds the Disability program.  I am in the Disability program.  Those who cannot work, due to physical or mental disabilities (which can be invisible to the naked eye), are paid a modest monthly income or partial income and given preventative health care.  This program could be expanded to include more people.  There is the need for it.

The Disability program is a cost savings measure.  It helps keep 9.24 million people out of sectors that are very costly to society like emergency rooms, hospital beds, and homeless shelters.

My mental Disability is chronic and, so far, incurable.  New medications are developed to treat my Disability each year, but the scientists have yet to discover a cure.  Because of the incurable quality of my Disability, I will probably be on Social Security until the day I die (like all Americans).  

It can be argued that a great nation like the USA, if organized a little differently, could go farther and develop a post scarcity economy.  Some argue that the numbers are already there for the state to provide basic necessities like food, clothing, shelter, education, medicine, and safety to all of its citizens.  Almost all developed nations include universal health care.  A great nation like the USA should too.  This is not Communism.  This is success and most successful countries expect these kinds of benefits and achieve these kinds of goals.

Well, it's the silly season, so I have devolved to national politics.  Now you know a little more about me and how I feel about our country.  The USA is already great.  Let's make it great for all Americans in our empowering diversity.

—

Chapter 2

It was in 2019 that I began vaporizing legal medical cannabis.  I had developed arthritis in my shoulders and took the medicine for chronic and intractable pain as is permissible under Ohio law.  The medical marijuana program in Ohio began in 2016. I entered the program in 2019 and I have been on medical cannabis ever since. This is my forth year in the program. Cannabis is an anodyne, a wonder drug, a therapeutic medicine sufficient for the treatment of over twenty five ailments in Ohio,, and it should not be unfairly stigmatized.

Chapter 3 

In Indian Hill, I returned to writing.  I began to revise and combine some of my more recent writings into a compilation of short pieces I called Omnibus.  I would later publish Omnibus as Lemonade in January of 2023. 

It was at this point that my parents found a copy of my Konflagrations and showed it to me.  I thought that it had been completely lost when the hard drive on my SE/30 crashed.

I read a little of what I had written in my twenties, didn’t like it at all, and set to the task of rewriting Konflagrations responsibly from the perspective of a mature adult.

Book Twenty Six 

Chapter 1

Over a year ago, we moved to a community neighboring Indian Hill called the City of Madeira.  I have a comfortable, furnished basement apartment. I still live with my parents. 

Chapter 2 

My father had some bookshelves constructed in one corner of my basement apartment, so when we moved to Madeira, I unpacked my library, and once again had access to my personal research library. Reading these books restores my better nature. I began to read, reread, and continue writing. Through my writing, I have regained my sense of humor.

Chapter 3 

It is here in Madeira that I began to publish my popular literary work.  Lemonade was published in January 2023.  My next book, Applesauce, a sequel, continuation, and explanation of my first book will also be published in 2023.

This memoir, revised and refined, should be published in 2024. I plan to work on it until the first of the year so expect a good effort. Like all my recent writing, I have tried to be more accessible, primarily through simplifying my vocabulary, for you the reader.

I am currently working on a novel.  Hard Cider is what I am provisionally calling it. The novel is a work in progress. It’s a lively, naughty, insouciant ditty. I am also thinking about writing a detective novel that will take place entirely at night (in contrast to my present “early bird” daily schedule). I am a comic writer, in my own idiosyncratic and occasionally morbid ways, and I hope these works, and this memoir itself, will provide entertainment and opportune ground for interesting debate and conversation.

What can you learn from my life so far. Don’t drink for two. Don’t trust your government. Be wary of teaching Marx. Do it anyway. Don’t trust the corporate media unless you trust the individual corporations and the leaderships they represent. Murdoch, an archconservative, controls FOX news. The Rockefellers, originally an oil corporation, control NBC. The claim to objectivity, which they share with other news sites, is usually a reiteration of the Democratic and Republican lines. This leaves a lot unexamined but I have written about my discomfort with a twin party system when it serves to maintain the status quo.

I rarely watch television, though I regularly relax by watching YouTube. Most of the good public programs are available on YouTube and up to date. There is an immense range to the subject matter available on YouTube. It relieves curiosity.

Writing, especially the hunt and peck method that I use when writing on my mighty iPad mini, is physical work. It exhausts the body and the mind. So don’t quit your day job, especially if it’s an academic career, for a literary career. Success is rare and usually fleeting.

If you are interested in a PhD in the humanities, a doctorate in philosophy, start with an undergraduate degree in philosophy. Few youthful students know early on that they will approach a career as a PhD. I didn’t complete my PhD, but found the process of study rewarding. I learned enough to be self educating and, through this avocational reading and writing, newly self conscious.

If you are interested in an academic career in the humanities, be aware that the career path has been degraded by economic rationalism. It’s a worthwhile career newly made worthless, but it still has potential. Many former associate professor jobs in the humanities have been converted to what are called adjunct positions. Adjuncts teach and write, but face poor pay, uncertain benefits, and little opportunity for advancement. The career has altered.

The PhD still provides an endlessly intriguing profession and some of the best opportunities for women globally. The western humanities, the liberal arts, are a lot to understand. There are thousands of books to be read, and I have read hundreds, to get a comprehensive knowledge of the subject of western culture. Teaching and scholarly work, research and writing, offer great value if not the value of immediate economic rationalism. They teach critical thought and the ability to think critically is valuable and increasingly rare.

What has my experience meant to me? My evolution has not been painless. It has been slow. It has not been uniform. It has not been without setbacks. These setbacks and pain, hone one’s intelligence, shape one’s perspective, and eventually defines one’s program and goals. What are people but a product of their experience?

I have become, I think, a secular humanist. I am secular. I am not religious, I don’t practice any religion. I am spiritual and, like it or not, have been heavily influenced by the Old Testament and accounts of the life of the Buddha. So I am secular but spiritual still. Am I a humanist? I still am motivated by the pursuit of the good and a desire for progress. The concept of the good and progress have been qualified for me by my reading in French poststructuralism. The French are wary of the concepts of the good and progress because these concepts, as many Americans are unaware, were used to justify the Third Reich—their enemy in the world wars and an enemy newly resurgent in our own time.

Appendix 1

My Image

Why I Look The Way I Do

I am only human. I am nearly bald and getting balder. I think a sheered skull calls attention to my meager intellect.

As someone who has seen and experienced suffering while homeless, I understand some of the Buddha’s human experiences. The Buddha roamed homelessly for much of his life. I do not claim to be a practicing Buddhist, though Buddhism interests me. It is profound because it includes human practice, meditation (which I cannot comfortably undertake now because of all the voices in my head), intellectual knowledge, and spiritual value. Many Buddhist’s shave their heads for reasons of humility and modesty.

While I am not a combatant, and deliberately avoid supporting groups with militant wings, I don’t mind looking severe. I have Nazi’s in the neighborhood. They threaten me verbally; I answer with my iPad mini. Don’t I look a little like GI Jo? I had a GI Jo doll as a kid. I’m still fighting the fascists intellectually. Let there be no mistake, I can be subtle, but I’m still fighting WW2.  The Nazis and Nazi ideology in America are what I oppose as all good Americans should.

I trim my own hair and beard. I am self barbered. I don’t like the expense or conventional environment of most barbershops. I am modest and I don’t mind looking homely and not telegenic..

Appendix 2

Marijuana in Ohio, USA

Marijuana has been legally available in Ohio medicinally since 2016. I have taken this medicine, with the recommendation of specially trained MDs (as required by Ohio law) since 2019.

Where I Get My Dope and How I Smoke It

I can only purchase my medicinal marijuana at Ohio approved dispensaries (legal state approved marijuana pharmacies). There are several dispensaries in the Cincinnati region where I have resided for over twenty years.

There are many ways to use medicinal marijuana legally in Ohio. You can purchase medical marijuana legally at the dispensaries with a state ID and a state issued medicinal marijuana card, in many forms. There are gummy candies laced with THC and flower for example. I mostly use the flower of the plant, which used to be known as bud. Flower is a medicinal marijuana one can only vaporize. I have two vaporizers an AirVape vaporizer with a lithium battery that needs to be recharged, and a DYNAVAP, vaporizer that requires only a focused lighter.

Why I Still Smoke Marijuana

I believe, with the doctors of Ohio, that marijuana has legitimate medicinal value. It is believed by the doctor’s of Ohio to be therapeutic for the treatment of more than twenty five ailments. I have suffered daily, I am only human, from arthritis and arthritis caused chronic pain. The categories of arthritis and chronic pain each qualify me for the legal medicinal use of marijuana along with a doctor’s approval. I have had several doctors’ approvals. I have had held state legal credentials since 2019. My credentials are current and do not expire until May 31, 2024. Marijuana has been wrongly stigmatized.

Appendix 3

Paul A Bové’s Intellectuals in Power (1986): On Fascism

Intellectuals in Power is a fundamentally antifascist work. Professor Bové does not spare humanism. He is suspicious of the way in which humanism, the pursuit of “the good,” was used to justify Naziism. Bové articulates the ways in which humanism was used lo legitimate the Nazi’s authoritarian agenda. Bové writes about Auerbach’s critically popular and very influential Mimesis,

Auerbach’s work, for example, is a variation of the Kantian version of the leading intellectual figure, whereas the humanistic discourse and practices that supported Hitler had their “origins” in Kant’s hoped-for sublimation of death … [What] I am calling the Kantian repression of the socially devastating consequences of the humanistic dependency on the demonic in culture—and the antithetical need to sublimate it—works itself out in fascism, as one reading of Nietzsche suggests it must and, in the process, delegitimates itself.

The “leading intellectual figure” of the Nazis was Hitler himself. Bové, ever cautious of authority, qualifies the role of the intellectual as we will see. Bové writes

Auerbach is finally too morally attached to that tradition [Western Culture] to see the necessary consequence of his own struggle, namely, to abandon the nostalgic, proprietorial, bourgeois attachment to the task of repeating the precious “meaning,” the “truth” of the tradition, and to turn critical practice boldly against the discourses, practices, and the institutions that embodied the “modernity” he so much despised..

Here we get a sense of how radical Bové can be. He seeks to redirect criticism towards the very institutions of which it is a part. This self reflection, on the limits and potential of the disciplinary matrix, is a necessary part of intellectual rigor and intellectual responsibility.

Intellectual rigor and intellectual responsibility demands the oppositional quality of the post human intellectual. No more Hitlers.  In the tradition of the oppositional intellectual we can find the continually debated and updated textual canon of oppositionality. This oppositional canon is as important as the discourse of hegemonic intellectuals and privileged by the continuous oppositionality of its ethics. It was as Brando replied in The Wild One in reply to the question "what are you rebelling against,” with “What do you got?”

This alternative canon is available for all to read and enjoy. In so doing, the oppositional privileges the existential role of the very finite and human proletariat, in the face of the empowered structures of wealth and oppression: inheritance and property—the institutions which perpetuate the ruling class.

So we might ask, Bové is a critic, he negates, but what does he advocate? What does he affirm? Following Antonio Gramsci, we discover that Bové affirmatively opposes Gramsci’s “commonsense,” the “institutional murder” of war, and “hegemonic” institutions themselves. He rejects the socially normative and embraces difference. He affirms the “importance” of participatory democracy.

[We] must judge the importance of critical practice by the degree to which and the ways in which it turns against the hegemonic institutions so intertwined with anthropological humanism. The more effectively anti-humanistic these variations “within” humanism, the more important and democratic they can be.

Bové advocates the participatory democracy elaborated by the Students for Democratic Society, an organization that was popular in his student days at Columbia. So modern humanism itself must be called into question because it is blinkered in its devotion to the myth of unproblematic progress, and because it has been used to justify the absolute power of the “great,” “leading” and “good” leader who was in turn elevated above the people. All of this is to say that Hitler was no democrat. Bové goes on to explore the nature of truth.

The “truth” of humanism’s “tradition” has been problematized over and again, and this has taught us that criticism requires two things of “truth”: on the one hand, it’s political appropriation, where necessary, for anti hegemonic purposes; on the other, it’s delegitimization as an essential function within humanistic or anthropological culture in order to weaken that culture and prepare for whatever might follow … “. [Or in Horkheimer’s formulation] Truth is a function of political struggle.

Bové often writes about strategies and tactics. In the above quotation we learn how committed he is to disrupting our knowledge of self evident or “commonsense,” truth. He seeks to redirect criticism to “delegitimate” hegemonic cultural institutions and “weaken” culture to prepare for “whatever might follow.” Notice that Bové is not a utopian. He does not here advocate an unproblematic better world, by whatever means necessary, for this was the mistake of humanism. This violent utopianism was the mistake of the Inquisition. “Whatever [a loose formulation] may follow” suggests that anything would be preferable to the present.

Does Bové despair? No. He rejects the tragic, “despairing,” hopeless vision of the Benjaminian historian angel, in favor of active participation in the world.

Bové cites Horkheimer’s definition of “truth” as a function of political struggle to relativize humanism’s rationalistic, unproblematic, and simple, definitions of truth. Bové writes:

“Truth” is not just historical and so changing; it is a function of human desire to modify reality for one’s own and one’s own class or group interests. This is, of course, precisely what it is in humanism as well. The difference is humanism’s attempt to mask the politics of truth in the claims of pragmatic reason.

“Truth” is not true, but truth is a “mask” that obscures the “politics of truth.” It seeks to mask self interest with claims of unbiased universality.

To bring this discussion of Bové’s articulation of the role of the intellectual full circle, examine the following quotation which returns us to Bové’s rejection of fascism. Bové is an American scholar with an international perspective. His latest book, Love’s Shadow, was published by Harvard University Press. He is an American democrat, and his conclusions are interesting.

Once established, humanistic “truth” is anti revolutionary and unitary and insists on continuity.

“Truth” is problematic. It is often used in an uncritical way to justify relationships of oppression and exploitation—to justify master and slave. For isn’t fascism “anti revolutionary” in its promotion of a violently coercive state, and also “unitary” in its promotion of the great leader to represent the folk in the name of the “good.” In its xenophobia, and in its hostility towards internal minorities, the fascist state is never “good.” This hostility to others “unified” the Nazi in group around Hitler at the expense of Germany’s minorities and leftists—reliable out groups with whom the Nazi’s could not reason—in fact collapse before reason—and differences in thought were converted into enemies of the state and brutally slaughtered.

In the late 1940s, given not only the horror of the war, but also, for the “culturally enlightened” intellectual, the illegitimacy of the traditional high cultural discourses for dealing with power, reason, justice, and desire, given, in other words, the apparently final failure of the intellectual [reasoning] class to understand and account for history … even for those intellectuals who see that much of humanistic discourse at least indirectly aided the Nazi horror, no possibility for making sense of a world where power and reason are permanently fragmented seems to exist. Intellectuals should, then, despair. They seem to be dealing with a closed system of power and irrationality unanswerable to morality or reason.

This intellectual “despair,” probably best epitomized in Adorno’s phrase “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz,” is the subject of Bové’s Love’s Shadow. He turns to Walter Benjamin to interpret this tragic view. His critique of Benjamin stresses the politically paralyzing results of Benjamin’s tragic view of history. According to Benjamin, this despair is an emblematization of the role of the intellectual in Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus wherein an angel of history observes and records the horrors of past history, while being blind to the potential of the future. This emblematization leaves little space for the production of emergent counterhegemonic critical discourse. There is a “politics of despair,” that despairs of the past, that remains helpless in the present, and that is blind to the possibilities of the future. This is the “politics” of Benjamin’s angel.

Goethe writes,

The one past all my powers empowered [the Devil],

He cannot alter anything external.

Existence seems a burden to detest,

Death to be wished for, life a human jest [Benjaminian’s despair and tragedy privileges the death drive over an affirmative life’s participation in the world. It privileges the separation of the intellectual from the world in an ivory tower instead of a life fighting in the trenches.]

My curse I hurl on all that spangles

The mind with dazzling make-belief,

The soul, within this cave of grief!

Accursed, to start, the smug delusion [The separation of the intellectual from the world of life]

Whereby the mind itself ensnares!

Woe! Woe! [Isn’t this Benjamin’s tone?]

You have destroyed it,

The beautiful world

With mighty fist;

It crumbles scattered,

By a demigod shattered.

Forlorn,

We bear the ruins into the void,

And mourn

For beauty destroyed. [This is a prefiguration of Benjamin’s angel of history.]

Be done with nursing your despair,

Which, like a vulture, feeds upon your mind

The very meanest company bids fair

To let you feel a man among mankind.

The “man” who nurses despair (a vulture) destroys the potential of his mind. He joins in the long line of hegemonic intellectual men, and this despairing tone of what is to be done is perpetuated by the patriarchy. The oppositional intellectuals are separated from the world in their trenches of intellectual discourse, both in the struggle of graduate students to assimilate their ongoing education and express their conclusions in a politically contested space, and in the academic and disciplinary committees of the tenured professors wherein the professors debate, reject, and affirm. Intellectuals can either affirm the norm by perpetuating a masculinist discourse, or seek a better world by rejecting the present classist, racist, and misogynistic canon, to concentrate and focus on the discourse—in America, often feminist, African American, or poor—of the alternative canon.

What do we make of the counter hegemonic intellectual, Karl Marx, an intellectual of whom we must not despair, as Benjamin did? What’s the difference between Marx and Stalin? Marx still fascinates because he articulated anticapitalism at the time when capitalism was fresh and emergent with the new Industrial Revolution. He wrote at a time when communism was mostly just an idea. It was not yet encumbered by the compromises demanded by the militarized state form.

Marx saw the understanding of the emergent industrial revolution’s new mode of production, capitalism, and its new class, the wage worker or proletariat, as his primary concern. Marx is a theorist of human liberation. He wrote on the cusp. He rode the wave, and because of him, we understand better. His writing, like Freud’s, was so revolutionary, inspiring, and new, that it inspired a vast trove of written discourse and new secular institutions both within the university and without.

But when theory is put into practice, it often antagonizes its antecedent. Communism, under Stalin, when consolidated in state form, came to represent the domination of a terroristic police state justified by the “good” of state cohesion. Is the USA so different? How close are we to a military dictatorship or a bank republic?So, we can consider liberating and life bringing, the theorist of the emergent working class; but dominating and murderous, the practices of the state under Stalin.

Perhaps the theorist of the transition from liberation to domination, so we can avoid the latter and accentuate the former, can be found in Lenin, who both participated in the revolution against the Czarist state, and helped form the new state of 1917: the USSR. Only then can we understand the ways in which liberation forces are co-opted in their transition to the militarized state form to create relationships of authority and domination. Then, we can provisionally answer the question of liberation actively, affirmatively, and in the world: What is to be Done?

Appendix 4

What is left after terror? What is left, when one’s body has been burned and run through, is a core identity shaped by fire and pain, and so “against the world,” so to speak. Is this critical oppositionality rare and hard won? I think it is today. It demands the commitment of actively working towards a better world.

Goethe thematized the temptations of Christian love and the temptations of destructive militarism. These are two aspects of the Western state. I learned Christian love as a child when I had to memorize the Bible’s Corinthians. This notion of love has caused me more trouble than worth. I have loved sincerely, but without exception love has been used to take advantage of me. I was taught to turn the other cheek and, home alone, was not aware of disparagements on my character.

I was taken advantage of as a child. I refuse to fall for unconditional love again. Adult love doesn’t turn the other cheek. Adult love is conditional. Adult love is never unconditional.

Is love used to justify terror? Christian love has been used to justify militarism by the Western state. Militarism is death bringing nihilism and so against Christian principle, if not Christian institutions which often sustain, justify, and perpetuate both Christian terrorism (the racist KKK) and state terrorism too.

So I am ambivalent about Christian love and American militarism even though I grew up during a time of their celebration—the Reagan 1980s. Wasn’t the 60s do-goodism, the American ideology of the good, a product of the idea of Christian love. Wasn’t the 60s militarism profoundly evil to a Christian perspective?

What do we make of the humble soldier himself, for wars are not fought by the Generals, always in power or the temporary politicians the Generals control? A supreme violence is done to the fighting men and fighting women to make them violet and nihilistic enough to kill—to take life. Actual torture of the soldier is an intentional part of some military training. For isn’t all war “institutionalized murder,” as I was taught. And aren’t all soldiers torture victims—in mind and in body? Haven’t they all been tortured, broken, and programmed in boot camp, or whatever military training, to kill?

Hasn’t this 60s do-goodism, a secular, but only partially purged, result of Christianity, come to represent the values of the Democratic Party? Doesn’t our current commitment to the Ukraine represent an anti-invasive militarism? When did invasive militarism become the principle value of the Republican Party or had it become the ideology of the entire country as early as Korea when

[M]ilitary spending nearly quadrupled shortly after [the invasion of South Korea], on the pretext that the invasion of South Korea was the first step in the Kremlin conquest of the world—despite the lack of compelling evidence, then or now, for Russian initiative in this phase of the complex fate of Korea.

So the (exaggerated) threat of the USSR was used to justify a military build up which affected the entire tone of the political conversation.

This is why peace is so valuable to a veteran. I’ll write on it when I know it. I have known the inability and laziness brought about by sloth and brain damage. I have known the torture of intentional disease used against me as a weapon. Have I touched a nerve? Is it okay to torture wordsmiths and idea people for the nonviolent expression of their ideas in America? Has it always been that way? Have I become an American prisoner of conscience?

I only financially support the ACLU, with their hostility to censorship and their support for women’s rights, The SPLC, a southern anti-hate group, and NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. These are legalistic organizations who go to law, not to war. I never support terrorism or violent organizations. I advocate peace and support the goals of Amnesty International with my pen (and you should too, because I do so inadequately) and the torture victims they sustain because they prick my conscious and because I feel responsibly-obliged to understand them.

These are profoundly western notions, love and annihilation, to which we can counterpoise the eastern notions of compassion and Wu Wei. Now I will turn my attention to articulating these concepts to the western reader.

The idea of compassion is an attempt to emphasize with all, not just those of our religion. Religion is a western notion, of Rome, and not intrinsic to the east at all. What is called eastern religion is often an hypostatic simplification of eastern practice and an articulation of eastern philosophy that is theistic or Buddha-as-God based

What is Wu Wei? Let us start with some definitions from Wikipedia. Wu Wei is an ancient Chinese concept literally meaning "in-exertion", "inaction", or "effortless action."

The Swiss expert, Jean François Billeter defines Wu Wei as a

"state of … knowledge of the reality of the situation, … efficaciousness and the realization of a[n] … economy of energy", which Oxford's Edward Slingerland qualifies in practice as a "set of ('transformed') dispositions (including physical bearing)... conforming with the normative order".

Hence, Sinologist Herrlee Creel considered wu wei, as found in the Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi, to denote two different things.

1.An "attitude of genuine non-action, motivated by a lack of desire to participate in human affairs" and

2.A "technique by means of which the one who practices it may gain enhanced control of human affairs".

Okay. This is how Wikipedia defines the ancient Chinese dynamic concept, not a fixed idea in the Western sense, of Wu Wei. I can’t pin it down like pinning a butterfly to a mat. I don’t want to try.

The West believes in annihilating all opposition. They believe in a final victory which justifies all. Didn’t the epitome of Western militarism, the Nazi’s, believe in a Final Solution? Didn’t the US twice decide they were justified in dropping the Bomb? In western realpolitik, the ends justify the means.

How different is the eastern notion of Wu Wei in which there is a dynamic interplay between the indifference to politics of the eastern sage and the paradoxical way in which the sage gains influence as a guiding spirit as long as he or she maintains a principle of mastery always limited by modesty.

Goethe wrote in his diary about the value of a secular and humanistic experience and education. He wrote, on May 13, 1780.

The best is the deep quiet in which I live and grow against the world, and harvest what they cannot take from me by fire or sword.

—

Additions to be made:

History of Ford GT40 (Shelby) Won The 24 Hours LeMans endurance race from 1960 through 1965 

Add Wizardry, Altered Beast, The Revenge of Shinobi, Tetris, Space Harrier 2, Phantasy Star, Doom, Duke Nukem and the Medieval Madness pinball machine to the list of completed video games.

Van Halen, “Ain't Talkin’ Bout Love”

60s free love: pleasure>commerce

First beer: Strohs (fire brewed)

High School beer: Red, White, & Blue (12 packs of 12 oz bottles) 

Duke kegs

Graduate School beer: Koch's (sub $10 cases of 22 oz bottles from Beer World)

Quit date 03/15/2025.

The composition of the epistolary novel FA with M. Sell

The composition of Konflagrations in 1995.

The composition of Lemonade and Applesauce in 2023.

Twain spokesman for Toledo, Ohio’s Conklin Pen Co. (est. 1898).  Crescent Filler patent (first practical self-filling fountain pen)

Heraclitus: Unity of Opposites, Totalitarianism: Similarities of left and right dictatorships: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

—

David Santin Kilday’s Media Collection as of 9/2024

David Santin Kilday (DSK)

Copyright 2024

My Physical Book Library

21st Century French-English, English- French Dictionary 

Aaron.  Writers on the Left.

Abrams.  A Glossary of Literary Terms.

A Buddhist Bible, The Favorite Scriptures of the Zen Sect.  Martino Publishing, 2010.

Adams, Henry.  The Library of America.  V1 & V2.

Adorno, Theodor.  Minima Moralia.  Verso, 1974.

—-.  Prisms.  The MIT Press, 1981.

—.  Aesthetics and Politics.

—.  Negative Dialectics.

—.  The Jargon of Authenticity.

Alexander, Michelle.  The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.  New The New Press, 2010.

Almondo.  Progress and its Discontents.

Althusser.  Reading Capital.

—.  Lenin and Philosophy.

—.  For Marx.

Amsterdam.  Rough Guide.

Anderson.  Winesburg, Ohio.

Anderson.  Che Guevara.  A Revolutionary Life.

Anderson.  Why Cats Do That.

Anger.  Hollywood Babylon.

Arac.  After Foucault.

—.  Consequences of Theory.

—.  The Yale Critics.

—.  Postmodernism and Politics.

—.  Critical Genealogies. Me

Arendt.  The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Arnold.  Culture and Anarchy.

Aronowitz.  False Promises.

—.  Politics of Identity.

—.  The Crisis in Historical Materialism.

Artaud.  Selected Writings.

Ashbery.  Three Poems.

Asimov.  The Foundation Trilogy.

Atwood.  Surfacing.

Auerbach, Erich.  Mimesis, The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.  Princeton University Press, 1953.

Austen.  Pride and Prejudice.

—.  Nortanger Abbey.

Bach.  Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Bakhtin.  The Dialogic Imagination.

Ballard.  Crash.

—.  Hello America.

—.  Vermilion Sands.

Balzac.  Lost Illusions.

Barthes.  Mythologies.

—.  The Semiotic Challenge.

—.  The Rustle of Language.

—.  The Eiffel Tower.

—.  Barthes by Barthes.

—.  A Lover’s Discourse.

—.  Camera Lucida.

—.  S/Z.

—.  Writing Degree Zero.

—.  Criticism and Truth.

—.  On Racine.

__.  Image-Music-Text.

—.  Sade/Fourier/Loyola

—.  Empire of Signs.

—.  The Grain of the Voice.

—.  The Responsibility of Forms.

—.  New Critical Essays.

Bartholomae & Petrosky.  Ways of Reading.

Basker, James G.  Black Writers of the Founding Era, 1760–1800.  Library Classics of the United States, 2023.

Baudelaire.  Artificial Paradises.

—.  Les Fleurs du Mal.

Baudrillard.  America.

Bazin.  What is Cinema?  V1 & V2.

Beaty & Hunter.  New Worlds of Literature.

Beckett.  Endgame.

—.  Nohow On.

Beebe & Umstot.  Voyaging Under Power.

Behn.  Oroonoko.

Bell.  All Souls’ Rising.

—.  The Year of Silence.

—.  Waiting for the End of the World.

Bell, D.  The End of Ideology.

Benjamin, Walter.  The Arcades Project.  Harvard University Press, 2002.

—.  Moscow Diary.

—.  Selected Writings.  V1.

—.  The Origin of German Tragic Drama.

—.  Reflections.

Bell.  Virginia Woolf A Biography.

Bellow.  Humboldt's Gift.

—.  The Adventures of Augie March

Bergson.  Matter and Memory.

Berman.  Debating PC.

Bernstein.  Praxis and Action.

Best.  Make a Mil-Yen.  Teaching English in Japan.

BFI.  Pulp Fiction.

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin.  The post-colonial studies readers.  Routledge, 1995.

Bittman.  How to Cook Everything.

Blackmur.  Henry Adams.

Blake.  Cyberpunk.

Blanchet.  The Infinite Conversation.

Bohner.  Classic Short Fiction.

Borhes.  Labyrinths.

Bové.  Love’s Shadow.

—.  Intellectuals in Power.

—.  In the Wake of Theory.

—.  Mastering Discourse.

Boethius.  The Consolation of Philosophy.

Bourdain.  Kitchen Confidential.

Bourdieu.  The Logic of Practice. 

Bradley.  The Mists of Amazon.

Breton.  What is Surrealism?

Brodersen.  Walter Benjamin.

Bronner.  Critical Theory and Society.

Bronté.  Jane Eyre.

—.  Wuthering Heights.

Brown.  American Painting.

Buck-Morss.  The Dialectics of Seeing.

—.  The Origin of Negative Dialectics.

Bukatman.  Terminal Identity.

Bulfinch's Mythology.

Burack.  The Writer’s Handbook.

Burney.  Evelina.

Burns, Ken.  Jazz, The Story of America’s Music.

Burroughs.  Naked Lunch.

Butler.  Kindred.  Fledglings.  Stories.

—.  Adulthood Rites

Byron.  Oxford Critical Edition.

Camus.  The Stranger.

Capote. Other Voices, Other Rooms.

Carlsson.  Bad Attitude.

Carroll.  Alice in Wonderland.

—.  Signet.

Carrol, Jim.  Fear of Dreaming.

Carter.  Burning your Boats.

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg.  Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture.  Illini Books, 1988.

Castro.  The Art & Life of Georgia O’Keefe.

Cather.  My Antonia.

Cell.  The Highest Stage of White Supremacy.

Cervantes.  Don Quixote.

Chandler.  Trouble is my Business.

Chaucer, Geoffrey.  The Canterbury Tales.  Penguin Classics, 1951.

Chicago.  The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin.

Chomsky.  Deterring Democracy.

Chabouté.  Moby Dick.

Charters.  The Portable Sixties Reader.

Chaucer.  The Complete Poetry and Prose.

Clarke.  2010.

—.  The Songs of Distant Earth.

Clayes.  Ways to Poetry.

Cleaver.  Soul on Ice.

Coetzee.  Dusklands.

Conrad.  Heart of Darkness.

—.  Heart of Darkness.  The Secret Sharer.

—.  Nostromo.

—.  Lord Jim.

—.  The Secret Agent.

Continuum.  The Essential Frankfurt School Reader.

Cooper.  Notions of the Americans.

Coover.  The Universal Base Association, Inc.  J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

—.  The Public Burning.

Corf.  24 One Act Plays.

Cormack.  Ideology.

Cover.  The Origin of the Brunists.

Copleston, Frederick S. J.  The History of Philosophy.  Volume I–Volume IX.  Image Books, 1962.

Cragg & Speight.  House of Islam.

Creeley.  The Collected Poems.

Cumming.  Phenomenology and Deconstruction.

Da Capo.  Travel in Vogue.

Dallek.  The American Style of Foreign Policy.

Dana.  Two Years before the Mast.

Dante.  The Inferno.

—.  The Purgatorio.

Danto.  Nietzsche as Philosopher.

Darwin.  On the Origin of the Species.

David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson.  Film Art, An Introduction, Ninth Edition.  McGraw-Hill, 2010.

David Bordwell, et. al., eds.  The Classical Hollywood Cinema.

Davis.  City of Quartz.

David & Schleifer.  Contemporary Literary Criticism.

Debord.  Comments on the Society of the Spectacle.

Defoe.  Moll Flanders.

Deleuze, Gilles.  Spinoza, Practical Philosophy.  City Lights Books, 1988.

—.  Nietzsche and Philosophy.

—.  Cinema 1.

—.  Cinema 2.

—.  Spinoza: Practical Philosophy.

—.  Bergsonism.

—.  Masochism.

—.  The Logic of Sense.

—.  Foucault.

—.  The Fold.

—.  Kant’s Critical Philosophy.

—.  Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza.

Deleuze and Guattari.  On the Line.

—.  What is Philosophy?

—.  Kant’s Critical Philosophy.

Deleuze & Partnet.  Dialogues.

Delillo.  Americana.

—.  Libra.

—.  Great Jones Street.

—.  Mao II.

—.  White Noise.

—.  Ratner’s Star.

—.  Players.

—.  Running Dog.

—.  Falling Man.

—.  Underworld.

Derrida.  Spurs.

—.  Positions.

—.  Of Spirit.

—.  Speech and Phenomena.

—.  Writing and Difference.

—.  Deconstruction and Philosophy.

—.  Of Grammatology.

—.  Specters of Marx.

—.  Margins of Philosophy.

Derailleur.  Escape from Warsaw.

Descartes.  Philosophical Works I & II.

Dews.  Logics of Disintegration.

Dick.  Confessions of a Crap Artist.

—.  UBIK.

—.  Valis.

—.  The World Jones Made.

Dickens.  Barnaby Rudge.

—.  A Christmas Carol.

—.  The Pickwick Papers.

—.  Hard Times.

—.  Bleak House.

Dickinson.  Final Harvest.

Didion.  A Book of Common Prayer.

—.  After Henry.

—.  Run River.

—.  The Last Thing He Wanted.

—.  Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

—.  Salvador.

—.  Play it as it Lays.

Doctorow.  Billy Bathgate.

Dorfman & Mattelart.  How to Read Donald Duck.

Dostoevsky.  The Possessed.

—.  The Idiot.

—.  Demons.

—.  Notes from the Underground.

—.  The Brothers Karamazov.

Dr Seuss.  Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

Dreyfus.  Being-in-the-World.

Dungeons and Dragons.  Player’s Handbook.

DnD.  Monster’s Manual.

DnD.  Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything.

DnD.  Xanthar’s Guide to Everything.

DnD.  Monster's of the Multiverse.

Dromgoole.  What Cat’s Teach Us …”

Duke Journal of Politics.  V. IX

Eagleton.  Ideology.

—.  The Ideology of the Aesthetic.

Eco.  The Name of the Rose.

—.  The Island of the Day Before.

—.  The Mysterious Flame Loana.

Edgeworth.  Castle Rackrent and Ennui.

Ehrenreich.  Dancing in the Streets.

Eliade.  The Sacred and the Profane.

Eliot. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

Ellison.  Invisible Man.

—.  Collected Essays.

Engels.  The Condition of the Working Class in England.

Fairfield.  Communes USA

Fanon.  The Wretched of the Earth.

FASA.  Shadowrun.

—.  Harlequin.

Faulkner.  The Sound and the Fury.

—.  Collected Stories.

Ferguson.  Rewriting the Renaissance.

Feur.  The Conflict of Generations.

Fitzgerald.  The Great Gatsby.

—.  The Beautiful and Damned.

Firestone.  The Dialectics of Sex.

Firmian.  Modern Chess Openings.

Fish.  Is there a Text in this Class?

Flynn.  Sartre and Marxist Existentialism.

Foxx.  Solve It!

Flaubert.  Madame Ovary.

Fo.  Accidental Death of an Anarchist.

Foerster.  American Poetry and Prose.

Folklore Society.  No.6.

Foucault.  The Order of Things.

—.  Discipline and Punish.

—.  Power/Knowledge.

—.  The History of Sexuality.  V1.

—.  Remarks on Marx.

—.  The Archeology of Knowledge.

—.  Madness and Civilization.

—.  Language, Counter-memory, Practice 

Fowlie.  Rimbaud.

Frank.  The Diary of a Young Girl.

Frank.  The Diary of Anne Frank.

Frazer.  The Golden Bough.

Freedman.  Life of a Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke.

Freud.  Dora.

—.  Three Case Histories.

—.  Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

—.  Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.

—.  Civilization and it's Discontents.

—.  The Interpretation of Dreams.

Frost.  North of Boston.

Fuentes.  The Hydra Head.

Fulton.  Palladium.

Fuhrman.  Eat to Live.

Fussell, P.  Class.

Fussell.  Poetic Meter and Poetic Form.

Gardner.  Grendel.

Garvey.  Beautiful Crescent.  A History of New Orleans.

Gasché.  The Tain of the Mirror.  

Gass.  The Tunnel.

Gearhart and Rennie.  A Feminist Tarot.

Geertz.  The Interpretation of Cultures.

Gibson.  Hoyle’s Encyclopedia of Card Games.

Gibson.  Pattern Recognition.

—.  Idoru.

—.  Necromancer.

—.  Count Zero.

—.  Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Gibson.  The Miracle Worker.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.  Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia.  University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

—.  A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia.  University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

—.  Kafka.

Ginsberg.  The Fall of America.

Goddard, Dwight.  A Buddhist Bible.  Beacon Press, 1994.

Godwin.  Caleb Williams.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von.  Faust.  Norton Critical Edition, 1976.

Golding.  Lord of the Flies.

Graff & Warner.  The Origins of Literary Study in America.

Gramsci.  Selections from Cultural Writings.

—.   Prison Notebooks.

Grateful Dead.  Anthology.

Greenblatt & Gunn.  Redrawing the Boundaries.

Guattari and Negri.  Communists Like Us.

Guevara.  Guerrilla Warfare.

Habermas.  The Philosophical Discourse of Modernism.

Hacker.  A Writer’s Reference.

Hall.  The Hard Road to Renewal.

Halpern.  The Art of the Tale.

Hamilton.  Mythology.

Hamilton, J.  The Book of Ruth.

Hammett.  The Maltese Fountain.

Hamper.  Riverhead.

Hart.  Damage.

Harcourt Brace.  Modern American Prose.

Hardy.  Far from the Maddening Crowd.

—.  Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

—.  Jude the Obscure.

—.  The Mayor of Casterbridge.

Harr.  A Civil Action.

Harvey.  The Condition of Postmodernity.

Hayden.  The Port Huron Statement.

Hawthorne.  The Marble Faun.

—.  The House of Seven Gables.

—.  The Blithedale Romance.

Hebdige.  Hiding in the Light.

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.  Oxford University Press, 1977.

—.  Philosophy of Right.

Heidegger.  An Introduction to Metaphysics.

—.  What is Called Thinking?

Heinlein.  Time Enough for Love.

Held.  Introduction to Critical Theory.

Hemingway.  Green Hills of 

Africa.

—.  The Old Man and the Sea.

—.  The Sun Also Rises.

Heraclitus.  Fragments.

Herbert.  Dune Messiah.

—.  God Empower of Dune.

—.  Children of Dune.

—.  Chapterhouse Dune.

Herbert, K.  A Fine Excess.

Hewes.  Famous American Plays of the 1940s.

Hobbes.  Leviathan.

Hodges.  Philosophy of the Urban Geurrilla.

Hofstadter.  Gödel, Escher, Bach.

Hooks.  Talking Back.

Homer.  The Iliad.  Penguin Classics, 1950.

Homer.  The Odyssey.  Penguin Classics, 1946.

Horkheimer.  Critical Theory.

Horkheimer & Adorno.  Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Horowitz.  Ideology and Utopia.

Howard.  Shakespeare Reproduced.

Huizinga.  The Waning of the Middle Ages.

Haynes.  The Collected Tales of Joseph Conrad.  V1 & V2.

Husserl.  Origin of Geometry.  Derrida.

Ibsen.  Eight Plays.

James.  Born to Win.

James, Henry.  The Wings of the Dove.

—.  Confidence.

—.  Eight Tales from the Major Phase.

—.  The Portrait of a Lady.

—.  The Golden Bowl.

—.  The American.

Jameson, Fredric.  Postmodernism. Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.  Duke University Press, 1991.

—.  Signatures of the Visible.

—.  Late Marxism.

—.  Marxism and Form.

—.  The Political Unconscious.

—.  The Ideologies of Theory V1 & V2.

—.  The Prison-house of Language.

Jannach.  German for Reading Knowledge.

Jauss.  Toward an Aesthetic of Reception.

Jay.  The Dialectical Imagination.

Jenkins.  A Walk Across America.

Jingsheng.  The Courage to Stand Alone.

Joyce, James.  Ulysses.  Wilder Publications, 2009.

—.  Ulysses.  Vintage.

—.  Ulysses.  Vintage.

—.  Dubliners.  Vintage.

—.  Dubliners.

—.  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

—.  Finnegan’s Wake.

Kael.  I Lost it at the Movies.

—.  Going Steady. 

Kant.  Critique of Pure Reason.

—.  Critique of Judgement.

—.  Critique of Practical Reason.

—.  Prolegomena.

Katz, Ephraim.  The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition.  MacMillan, 2001.

Katz & Nolen.  The Film Encyclopedia.

Kaufmann, Walter.  Nietzsche, Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Fourth Edition.  Princeton University Press, 1974.

—.  Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sarte.

—.  Hegel:.

Kerouac.  On the Road.

—.  The Subterraneans.

—.  Safe in Heaven Dead.

—.  Dr Sax.

—.  Selected Letters (1940-1956).

Kiek.  Everybody's Historic London .

Kierkegaard.  Fear and Trembling.

—.  The Sickness Unto Death.

Kilday, David Santin.  Lemonade.  Page Publishing, 2023.

Kilday, David Santin.  Applesauce.  Page Publishing, 2023.

Kierkegaard, Søren.  Either/Or, Part 1 & Part 2.  Princeton University Press, 1987.

—.  The Diary.

Knowles.  A Separate Peace.

Kolakowski.  Main Currents in Marxism.  V1 & V2.

Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid.

Lacan.  The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.

Larkin.  Collected Poems.

Lauterbach.  Clamor.

Longmeadow Press.  O. Henry.

Kafka.  The Trial.

—.  The Castle.

—.  Amerika.

Kleinbaum.  Dead Poets Society.

Klotz.  Literature, the Human Experience.

Knabb.  Situationist International Anthology.

Kojève.  Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.

Kolakowski.  Main Currents of Marxism.  V3.

Kracauer.  From Caligari to Hitler.

Kuhn.  Alien Zone.

Lacan.  Écrits.

Laclau & Mouffe.  Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.

Laing.  Self and Others.

Landy.  British Genres.

Langenscheidt.  The College German Dictionary.

Lattimore.  The Odyssey of Homer.

Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula Treichler, eds.  Cultural Studies.  Routledge, 1992.

Le Bon.  The Crowd.

LeGuin.  Dispossessed.

Leibnitz.  Discourse on Metaphysics.  

—.  Theodicy.

Lentricchia.  Ariel and the Police.

—.  After the New Criticism.

—.  Criticism and Social Change.

Lentricchia, Melissa. No Guarantees.

Lincoln.  The Black Experience in Religion.

Lodge.  Modern Criticism and Theory.

Löwith, Karl.  From Hegel to Nietzsche, The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought.  Columbia University Press, 1964.

Lawn.  The Short Story.

Lawrence.  The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail.

Lawrence and Lee.  Inherit the Wind.

Lawrence. D. H. Selected Short Stories.

—.  The Rainbow.

—.  Sons and Lovers.

—.  Women in Love.

Lazere.  American Media and Mass Culture.

Lefebvre.  Critique of Everyday Life.

Lentrichia and McLaughlin.  Critical Terms for Literary Study.

Lynd, Staunton, ed.  Nonviolence in America.  The Bobbs Merrill Company, 1966.

Lee.  To Kill a Mockingbird.

Lenin.  What is to be Done?

—.  Imperialism.

—.  State and Revolution.

Leotard.  The Postmodern Condition.

Linklater.  Slacker.

Living Language.  German.

Llosa.  The Real Life of Alejandro Maya.

Locke.  The English Empiricists.

Lowry.  The Giver.

Lowry, M.  Under the Volcano.

Lucretius.  The Way Things Are.

Lukács.  History and Class Consciousness.

—.  The Historical Novel.

—.  The Theory of the Noel.

Lynch.  The Image of the City.

M. Tinkcom and A. Villarejo eds.  Keyframes.

Machiavelli, Niccolò.  The Art of War.  The De Capo Press, 1965.

—.  Florentine Histories.

Macmillan.  Literature.

Mailer.  The Executioner’s Song.

—.  The Gospel According to the Son.

—.  Miami and the Siege of Chicago.

Malouf.  It Had to Be You.

Mann.  The Holy Sinner.

—.  The Magic Mountain.

—.  Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man.

Marcuse.  One-Dimensional Man.

—.  Reason and Revolution.

Marquez.  One Hundred Years of Solitude.

—.  The Autumn of the Patriarch.

—.  Innocent Eréndira.

Marx.  Capital  V1.  V2.  V3.

—.  The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

—.  Critique of the Gotha Programme.

—.  The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

Marx and Engels.  The German Ideology.

—.  Selected Works.  V1.  V3.

Marx and Lenin.  Civil War in France.

Massumi.  A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Mast & Cohen.  Film Theory and Criticism.

Macmillan Library Heritage.  The American Experience: Drama.

Marcuse.  Eros and Civilization.

Marlowe.  The Complete Plays.

McInerney.  Bright Lights, Big City.

McLuhan.  Understanding Media.

Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Douglas M. Kellner, eds.  media and cultural studies, KeyWorks.  Blackwell Publishing, 2001.

Mehring.  Karl Marx.

Melville.  Typee.  Omoo.  Mardi.

—.  Moby Dick.  Norton.

—.  The Confidence Man.

—.  Pierre.

—.  Moby Dick.

Merleau-Ponty.  Phenomenology of Perception.

Mick Martin and Marsha Porter.  Video Movie Guide 1993.  Ballantine, 1992.

Miles.  Hippie.

Miller, A.  Death of a Salesman.

—.  The Crucible.

—.  A View from the Bridge.

Miller, F.  Batman, The Dark Knight Returns.

Miller, H.  Sexus.  

—.  Plexus.  

—.  Nexus.

Milne.  The World of Christopher Robin.

—.  The House at Poo Corner.

—.  Winnie-the-Pooh.

—.  The World of Pooh.

Milton.  Paradise Lost.

—.  Norton.

—.  Complete Poems and Major Prose.

Miner.  Insatiable Appetites.

Mitchell.  Gone with the Wind.

MLA Handbook, Eighth Edition.  The Modern Language Association of New York, 2016.

Moi.  Sexual Textual Politics.

Mondo 2000.  User’s Guide.  New Edge.

Moore & Gibbons.  

Watchmen.

Mordden.  Medium Cool.

Morrison.  Song of Solomon.

—.  A Mercy.

Mtwa/Ngema/Simon.  Woza Albert.

Murakami.  1Q84.

Nabokov.  Lolita.

—.  The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

—.  The Gift.

—.  Pnin.

—.  Ada, or Ardor.

—.  Pale Fire

—.  Invitation to a Beheading.

Negri.  Marx Beyond Marx.

—.  The Savage Anomaly.

New Left Review.  175.

New World Books.  Highlights of a Fighting History, 60 Years of the Communist Party USA.

Ngugi.  The Black Hermit.

Nicosia.  Memory Babe.

Nietzsche, Friedrich.  The Gay Science, With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs.  Vintage Books, 1974.

—.  Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  The Modern Library, 1992.

—.  Untimely Meditations.  Cambridge University Press, 1989.

—.  Daybreak.

—.  Human All to Human.

—.  The Twilight of the Idols.  The Anti-Christ.

—.  The Birth of Tragedy.  The Case of Wagner.

—.  The Genealogy of Morals.  Ecce Homo.

Noel.  Bronze Age.

—.  Autobiography in Words.

Noel, E.  Caribbean Plays for Playing.

O’Dell.  The Black Pearl.

Ornstein & Ehrlich.  New World New Mind.

Orwell.  Animal Farm.

Osofsky.  Puttin’ Ole Massa.

O’Mara.  Great Cat Tales.

Padgett.  An Anthology of New York Poetry.

Palmer.  Shining Path of Peru.

Palmeri and Milligan.  French for Reading Knowledge.

Pamuk.  The Black Book.

Partnoy.  You Can't Drown the Fire.

Patterson.  Shakespeare and the Popular Voice.

Pines & Willemen.  Questions of Third Cinema.

Pinker.  The Sense of Style.

Plaatje.  Native Life in South Africa.

Plath.  The Bell Jar.

—.  Ariel.

Plato.  The Collected Dialogues.

Poe.  Complete Tales and Poems.

Polan.  Power & Paranoia.

Polo.  The Travels.

Polygraph.  ⅔

Powell.  The Anarchist’s Cookbook.

Prima.  Watch Dogs.

Prouty.  The Spanish Tragedy Kid.

Proust.  In Search of Lost Time. V1-V6.

Pynchon.  Vineland.

—.  V.

—.  Gravity’s Rainbow.

—.  Gravity's Rainbow.  Bantam.

—.  Mason & Dixon.

—.  Slow Learner.

—.  Against the Day.

Rabelais.  Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Roadway.  Reading the Romance.

Ronell.  Crack Wars.

Rostand.  Cyrano de Bergerac.  

Reed.  Mumbo Jumbo.

Reporting Vietnam.  Part 1 & Part 2.

Renan.  An Introduction to the American 

Underground Film.

Rhode.  A History of the Cinema.

Rilke.  The Notebooks of Malte Laurids.

—.  Duino Elegies and The Sonnets of Orpheus.

Rimbaud.  A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat.

Riso.  Enneagram Transformations.

Robinson.  The Buddhist Religion.

Ronald.  Words for the Wild.

Ronell.  The Telephone Book.

Rose.  Marx’s Lost Aesthetic.

Rosen.  Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology.

Rosenwald.  War No More.

Roth.  Call it Sleep.

Rudé.  The Crowd in History.

Rushdie.  The Moor’s Last Sigh.

—.  Midnight’s Children.

—.  Fury.

—.  Shalimar the Clown.

—.  The Satanic Verses.

Rucker.  Software.

—.  Wetware.

Ruskin.  Unto this Last and Other Writings.

Russel.  The History of Western Philosophy.

Ryan.  Marxism and Deconstruction.

Sade.  Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings.

Said.  Culture and Imperialism.

—.  The Work of the Critic, Speaking Truth to Power.

—.  Beginnings.

—.  The World, the Text, and the Critic.

Salinger.  Franky and Zoey.

—.  The Catcher in the Rye.

Sanders.  Terrarium.

Sartre.  The Words.

—.  Being and Nothingness.

—.  Between Existentialism and Marxism.

—.  Search for a Method.

—.  Critique of Dialectical Reason.

—.  Nausea.

SAS Survival Guide.

Schorske, Carl E.  Fin-De-Siècle Vienna.  Vintage Books, 1981.

Sedgwick.  Between Men.

Sell.  Avante-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism.

Saramago.  The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis.

Saussure.  Course in General Linguistics.

Shakespeare.  The Riverside Second Edition.

Shanes.  JMW Turner.  The Foundations of Genius.

Sheldon.  Nebraska: Old and New.

Sterne.  Tristan Shandy.

Shaw.  Major Barbara.

—.  Caesar and Cleopatra.

Shea and Wilson.  The Illuminatus Trilogy.

SheIn.  The Vegetable Gardener's Guide to Permaculture.

Shelley.  Frankenstein.

Shelley’s Poetry and Prose.  Norton.

Simpson.  The Forests of the Night.

Sinclair.  The Jungle.

Slotkin.  The Fatal Environment.

Smith.  On Walter Benjamin.

Smith.  The Wealth of Nations.

Sophocles.  The Oedipus Plays.

Sohnya Sayres, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowiitz, Fredric Jameson, eds.  The 60s Without Apology.  The University of Minnesota Press, 1984 (by Social Text).

Soja.  Postmodern Geographies.

Solzhenitsyn.  The Gulag 

Archipelago.

Sontag.  Against Interpretation.

Sorel.  The Illusions of Progress.

—.  Reflections on Violence.

Soriano.  A Funny Dirty Little War.

Souter.  The Pocket Guide to Dice and Dice Games.

Spinoza, Benedict De.  Ethics, Including Improvement of the Understanding.  Prometheus Books, 1989.

—.  A Theologico Political Treatise.

—.  Ethics.  TIE.  Selected Letters.

Spinrad.  Little Heroes.

Spivak.  In Other Words.

—.  The Post- colonial Critic.

Steedman.  Past Tense.

Stephenson.  Snow Crash.

Stevenson.  The Master of Ballantrae.

Steinbeck.  Of Mice and Men.

—.  The Grapes of Wrath.

Stevens.  Collected Poetry and Prose.

—.  Collected Poems.

St John.  Study for the World’s Body.

Stockensström.  The Expedition to the Baobab Tree.

Strugatsky.  The Time Wanderers.

Swift.  Gulliver’s Travels.

Sarris.  Confessions of a Cultist.

Shelley.  Frankenstein.

Sobchack.  Screening Space.

Stevens.  The Palm at the End of the Mind.

Stoker.  Dracula.

Szymborski.  View With a Grain of Sand.

Tally, Robert T. Jr.  Mapping and Globalization, Literary Cartography in the American Baroque Writer Melville.  Continuum International Publishing  Group, 2009.

—.  For a Ruthless Critique of All that Exists.

—.  Topophenia.

Tate Gallery.  Mark Rothko.

Tennyson.  Poems Selected by W. E. Williams.

The Holy Bible ESV Crossway.

The I Ching.

The New Yippie Book Collective.  Blacklisted News.

Twain.  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

—.  Pudd’nhead Wilson.

—.  Five Novels. B&N

Thackeray.  Vanity Fair.

The Archive Fall.  1998.

The Chicago Manual Of Style, Seventeenth Edition.  The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

The Clear Quran.  Book of Signs Foundation, 2016.

The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition.  Clarendon Press,

The Essential Van Gogh.

The Hermitage.

The Holy Bible, English Standard Version.  Crossway, 2001.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature.  V1 & V2.

The Norton Anthology of Poetry.

The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.

The Rig Veda.

The Rough Guide to Amsterdam.

Thewelen.  Male Fantasies.  V1 & V2.

Thomas & Kuhn.  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Thompson.  Better than Sex.

Thornton.  Allusions in Ulysses.

Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White.  The Film Experience, Second Edition.  Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009.

Tolkien.  The Hobbit (75th)

—-.  The Hobbit

—.  The Fellowship of the Ring.

—.  The Two Towers.

—.  The Return of the King.

Tolstoy.  War and Peace.

Tomkins.  Living Well is the Best Revenge.

Trollope.  Phineas Finn.

—.  Can You Forgive Her?

—.  Phineas Redux.

—.  The Way We Live Now.

—.  Diamonds.

Trudeau.  We're Eating More Beets.

Twain.  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

—.  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

Vico.  The New Science.

Vidal.  Burr.

Villarejo.  Film Studies The Basics.

Virilio.  War and Cinema.

Vollman.  Riding towards Everywhere.

—.  The Ice-shirt

—.  Europe Central.

Vonnegut.  Slaughterhouse-Five.

—.  Player Piano.

Wallace.  Melville & Turner.

Ward.  Anarchy in Action.

Warhol.  A, a Novel.

Warren.  All the King’s Men.

Watkins.  Work Time.  English Departments and the Circulation of Cultural Value.

Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage.  Mirriam-Webster, 1989.

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.  Mirriam-Webster.

Webster’s New World Dictionary 

Weinstein.  For a New America.

Welty.  One Writer’s Beginnings.

Wharton.  Ethan Frome.

Williams.  Television.

—.  Keywords.

—.  Marxism and Literature.

—.  The Country and the City.

Williams, J.  Style, Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace.

Williams, Judith.  Consuming Passions.

Willis, Susan.  A Primer for Daily Life.  Routledge, 1991.

Willis, Susan.  Specifying, Black Women Writing, The American Experience.  The University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.

Wilson.  To Finland Station.

Whitman.  Leaves of Grass.

Wittenstein.  Philosophical Investigations.

Wollstonecraft.  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Wolfe.  You Can't Go Home Again.

Wolfe, T.  The Right Stuff.

—.  A Man in Full.

Woolf.  Mrs Galloway.

—.  To the Lighthouse.

—.  Between the Acts.

—.  Jacob’s Room.

—.  The Waves.

—.  A Room of One’s Own.

—.  A Writer's Diary.

—.  Orlando 

—.  The Voyage Out.

—.  The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays.

Wright.  Black Boy.

Wycherley.  The County Wife.

Vaszek.  The Future is Female.

Yeats.  Selected Poems and Three Plays.

Yates.  Revolutionary Road.

Yuan-tsung, Chen. The Dragon’s Village.

Voltaire.  Candide.

Yovel, Yirmiyahu.  Spinoza and Other Heretics, The Adventures of Immanence.  Princeton University Press, 1989.

—.  Spinoza and Other Heretics, The Marrano of Reason.  Princeton University Press, 1989.

York.  Cincinnati, 60 Hikes within 60 Miles.

Zimmer.  Myths and Symbols inIndian Art and Civilization.

Zimmerman.  Dictionary of Classical Mythology.

Zizek.  The Sublime Object of Ideology.

Zola.  Nana.

Zone Books.  Foucault/Blanchet.

My Nook 4 GlowLight Ereader Library

Alighieri, Dante.  The Inferno.

Austen, Jane.  Emma.

—.  Pride and Prejudice.

—.  Sense and Sensibility.

Anonymous.  Beowulf.

Anonymous.  The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Aristotle.  Poetics.

Augustine.  Confessions.

Aurelius. Marcus.  Meditations.

Baldick, Chris.  The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms.

Berens, E. M.  Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome.

Baldwin, James.  Fifty Famous People.

Caroll, Lewis.  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Cervantes, Miguel De.  Don Quixote.

Chaucer, Geoffrey.  The Canterbury Tales.

Chekhov, Anton.  The Duel and Other Stories.

Conrad, Joseph.  The Mirror of the Sea.

—.  The Secret Sharer.

—.  Heart of Darkness.

—.  Nostromo.

—.  The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale.

Darwin, Charles.  On the Origin of Species.

Dickens, Charles.  Oliver Twist.

—.  A Tale of Two Cities.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor.  Notes From the Underground.

—.  The Brothers Karamazov.

—.  Short Stories.

—.  Poor Folk.

—.  The Idiot.

—.  The Possessed.

Doyle, Arthur Conan.  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.  

—.  The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

Du Bois, W. E. B.  The Souls of Black Folk.

Dumas. Alexandre,  The Three Musketeers.

—.  The Man in the Iron Mask.

Eliot, George.  Middlemarch.

Elliot, T. S.  The Wasteland and Other Poems

Euripides.  The Tragedies.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott.  This Side of Paradise.

Frome, Edith.  Ethan Frome.

Gaiman, Neil.  American Gods.

Gibbon, Edward.  Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Gibson, William.  The Peripheral.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von.  The Sorrows of Young Werther.

—.  Faust.

Grimm, Jacob.  Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel.  The Blithedale Romance.

Hemingway, Ernest.  A Farewell to Arms.

Hobbes, Thomas.  Leviathan.

Homer.  The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Hugo, Victor.  Les Miserables.

James, Henry.  The Bostonians.

—.  The Ambassadors.

Jameson, Fredric.  Mimesis, Expression, Construction.

Joyce, James.  Dubliners.

—.  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

—.  Ulysses.

KJV Reference Bible

Kuang, R. F.  Babel.

Leroux, Gaston.  The Phantom of the Opera.

London, Jack.  John Barleycorn.

Lovecraft, H. P.  The Complete Collection.

Machiavelli, Niccolo.  The Prince.

Melville,  Bartleby the Scrivener.

Milton, John.  Paradise Lost.

Mitchell, David.  Cloud Atlas.

Montaigne, Michel De.  Essays.

Murakami, Haruki.  Dance Dance Dance

Nietzsche, Friedrich.  Beyond Good and Evil.

Olcott, H. S. The Life of Buddha and its Lessons.

Ovid.  The Metamorphoses.

Paine, Thomas.  The Age of Reason.

—.  The American Crisis.

Plato.  Apology.

Poe, Edgar Allan, The Complete Tales.

Proust, Marcel.  THe Classic Collection

Richardson, Samuel.  Clarissa Harlowe

Sagan, Carl.  Cosmos.

Shakespeare, William.  Sonnets.

Shelley, Mary.  Frankenstein.

—.  The Last Man.

Shonin, Shinran.  Buddhist Psalms.

Smith, Adam.  The Wealth of Nations.

Sophocles.  The Oedipus Trilogy.

Stein, Gertrude.  Three Lives.

Stevenson, Robert Louis.  The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde.

Swift, Jonathan.  Gulliver’s Travels.

The Complete Works of Lord Byron

Thoreau, Henry David.  Walden and Civil Disobedience.

Tolstoy, Leo.  Anna Karenina.

—.  War and  Peace.

Tsumetomo, Yamamoto.  Hagakure:  The Book of the Samurai.

Twain, Mark.  Roughing It

—.  The Prince and the Pauper.

—.  Tom Sawyer, Detective.

Tzu, Lao.  Tao Te Ching

Various.  The Essence of Buddhism.

Voltaire.   Candide.

Wells, H. G.  The Invisible Man.

Wharton, Edith,  Thee Age of Innocence.

Whitman, Walt.  Leaves of Grass.

Wilde, Oscar.  The Importance of Being Earnest.

—.  The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Wiggin, Kate Douglas, Arabian Nights.

My DVD Library

2010: Moby Dick

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

All About the Benjamins

All is Lost

Almost Famous

Apocalypse Now Redux

Armageddon

Avatar

Avengers Age of Ultron

baby boy

Black Hawk Down

Black Rain

Blood Diamond

Blood Simple

Boyz N The Hood

Bull Durham

Caddyshack

Casablanca

Casino Royale

Chicago

Crazy Heart

Defiance 

District 9

Don Zhivago

Dr. Strangelove

Elysium

Fargo

Friday (Ice Cube)

Next Friday

Friday After Next

Full Metal Jacket 

Good Will Hunting

Gatsby

Gravity

Harold & Kumar

Go to White Castle

H&K Escape from Guantanamo Bay

A Very H&K Christmas

Higher Learning

Humphrey Bogart

The Essential Collection 

Interstellar 

Into the Deep

Iron Man

James Bond 

Ultimate Collector's Set

LA LA Land

Les Misérables

Moby Dick (John Barrymore)

Moby Dick (Gregory Peck)

Moby Dick Mini-Series (Patrick Stewart)

Moby Dick (William Hurt, Ethan Hawke, Donald Sutherland)

Moulin Rouge!

Mean Streets

Miller’s Crossing

No Country For Old Men

O Brother Where Art Though?

On the Road

One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest

Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim: Uprising 

Pineapple Express

Platoon

Poetic Justice

Point Break

Prometheus 

Purple Rain

Quantum of Solace

Raising Arizona

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World 

Skyfall

smartpeople

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow 

Star Trek 

The Original Series 

Star Wars Trilogy

Star Wars The Phantom Menace 

Star Wars Star WarsAttack of the Clones 

Star Wars Revenge of the Sith

Star Wars Return of the Jedi

Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back

Star Wars New Hope

St. Elmo’s Fire

Taxi Driver

Talladega Nights

The Artist 

The Big Lebowski

The Deer Hunter

The Fisher King

The Godfather 

The Godfather Part II

The Godfather Part III

The Grand Budapest Hotel

The Hobbit

The Hurt Locker

The Incredible Hulk

The Mission 

The Night Before 

The Phantom of the Opera

The Wonder Boys

Thelma & Louise 

The Grey

True Grit (Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, John Brolin)

WALL-E

Wall Street

Watchmen (Animated)

Watchmen (Director’s Cut)

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Who’s That Knocking At My Door 

Wonder Woman

Zero Dark Thirty

Here ends what I will share so far in my memoir.